


Awake, Aware

by Misaya



Series: Synchrony [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Iron Man (Comic), Iron Man (Movies), Iron Man - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Bucky Barnes - Freeform, Captain America: The First Avenger, Death, Domestic Violence, Eventual Happy Ending, Eventual Romance, Growing Up, Howard Stark Is a Dick, Howard Stark's A+ Parenting, Howard Stark's Bad Parenting, Human Jarvis (Iron Man movies), Kid Tony Stark, M/M, Pre-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Science Experiments, Stark Industries, Stark Tower, Steve Feels, Steve Rogers and the 21st Century, Technology, Tony Feels, Unrequited Crush
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-03
Updated: 2014-08-15
Packaged: 2018-01-14 10:09:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 20
Words: 36,332
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1262377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Misaya/pseuds/Misaya
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Before Steve Rogers disappeared off the face of the Earth, he agreed to an experimental procedure devised by Howard Stark that, if successful, would be used primarily for helping comatose patients wake up. It didn't appear to work, and so Howard put the project and Steve out of his mind. </p><p>So when the technology did begin to work, only Tony Stark, barely able to string three words together, was there to see it. </p><p>Eventual Steve/Tony, some spoilers for Captain America: The First Avenger (but really, it's been a few years now. Come on.). </p><p>Tags updated as I write.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Implantation

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bibliolatry](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bibliolatry/gifts), [fannyvonfabulus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fannyvonfabulus/gifts).



> Written to: [Song For No One - Miike Snow](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOhGevqqA1I).

"Hey, listen, I'm definitely not supposed to be doing this," Howard called from over his shoulder as he piloted the plane over the dark French countryside. Steve looked down, trying to catch a glimpse of something, anything, but the dark ground below him offered up nothing, not even the lonely lights of a small village, and he swallowed roughly, feeling very, very small. He tried to ignore Peggy as she sat solidly beside Howard, her back stiff; tried not to look, tried not to think about what might happen next, what might happen if he went down there and Bucky really was dead.

"So I was wondering, might I ask you a favour?" Howard continued, squinting as he tried to make out the location of the plane. "In the interest of science, of course."

"Of course," Steve muttered absentmindedly. Bucky couldn't be dead. He would have felt it. It was just some sort of misunderstanding, he was sure. Surely it couldn't have been Bucky's unit that had gone missing, or maybe it was another Bucky. Not his Bucky Barnes, that was a common name, wasn't it? It had to be.

"It'll be for thought collection," Howard explained, tossing a paper-wrapped package back at him. Steve caught it, tore it out of its yellow packaging, examined the vial of clear liquid that it contained. "That liquid you see there contains a lot of experimental nanobots - in other words, tiny robots. They'll swim up to your brain and attach themselves there."

Steve raised an eyebrow at Peggy's back, but she didn't turn around. "Are you sure this is safe?"

"Not at all," Howard called back. "That's why it's experimental. But since you have increased regen, I figure if they start eating into your brain tissue, you'll just be able to repair it quickly enough without any lasting damage."

Steve rolled his eyes, even though the two in front couldn't see. "And this is useful for...what exactly?"

"Oh, lots of different things," Howard said noncommittally, reaching out the rub the windshield of the plane with a sleeve. "Primarily, if it's successful, for comatose patients in hospitals, as a potential way to get them out of their comas."

Steve thought that that was a good idea, but hesitated before popping open the cap of the vial. "Any other uses I ought to know about?"

"I'm sure there are plenty of other things it could be used for if this tech is successful," Howard said, pulling the plane into a smooth left turn. "Interrogation. Psychoanalysis. A bunch of other things. That's if it works, though. There's a very likely chance that it won't. That's why it's experimental. Now drink up, your stop's coming up pretty quickly."

Steve sighed, frowned at the glass vial in his hands, looked at Peggy's stiff back, then sighed again before popping the cap and tossing down the contents in one long sip. It tasted bitter and horrible, and he nearly gagged, but forced himself to swallow it down anyway. He concentrated, holding his breath, wondering if he could feel the nanobots swimming up his bloodstream to his brain, but couldn't feel anything.

"You'd better jump!" Howard shouted back at him, pressing a few buttons on the control panel and opening the exit doors. "Good luck! Come back safe!"

As Steve dove out of the plane, he heard Howard mention something about fondue to Peggy, heard her laugh. Wondered, hoped, prayed that he'd see her again.

* * *

When he came back with Bucky, Howard Stark insisted on a thorough examination of his brain to make sure the nanobots had taken, that they were working. Steve sighed, but obliged; Howard had done quite a lot of things for him, he reflected as he looked down at the new vibranium shield he carried.

Howard pushed him into a medical tent, commanding him to take a seat on one of the cots, before pulling a silvery device with a large bug-eye lens and a black screen out of his pocket. He ordered Steve to lie back, and Steve obeyed, laying his head on the thin cotton pillow provided and staring up at the flapping white panels of the medical tent.

Howard whistled a tune that Steve didn't recognise as he slathered Steve's forehead with some cold gel that smelt vaguely like lemons and antiseptic and pressed the lens to Steve's skin. Steve watched him as he rolled up his coat sleeves and moved the lens around on Steve's forehead, checking the screen every once in a while, hemming and hawing and muttering to himself, occasionally leaning over and jotting down a few notes on a yellow notepad with a blue ballpoint pen. He wondered if he and Peggy had had fondue. If Peggy had liked it, and smiled at him, and laughed.

"Peculiar. Very peculiar," Howard finally concluded, pulling the lens off Steve's forehead with a little squeaky pop and handing Steve a wet wipe to rub off any extra gel.

"What's peculiar?" Steve asked, fearing the worst. "Are they really eating my brains away? I can't feel anything."

Howard looked at him as if he'd just said he was ready to defect to Nazi Germany. "No, don't be silly," he said after a moment. "They're not eating your brains. Your brain is completely fine."

"Then...what's wrong with me?" Steve asked, sitting up and fiddling with the crumpled up wet wipe.

"Nothing's wrong with you, per se. The nanobots are in place, everything's fine in that regard." Howard held out the screen, let Steve look at his brain scan, explained that the tiny green blips - which Steve thought were just specks of dust - in the wrinkled folds of Steve's brain matter were the nanobots. "I knew the nanobots needed an incubation period, but when I tested them on rats and dogs, they'd already started transmitting signals within five hours. Granted, they weren't very interesting thoughts, and were mainly pictures, pictures of food and bones and rubber balls or the like, but they definitely should have begun transmitting signals with you by now."

"Are you sure they're working?" Steve asked uncertainly, looking at the green specks again and wondering how this was possible.

"They are," Howard affirmed. "If they weren't working, they wouldn't have hung on to your brain. They're definitely on. They just aren't...giving me any data."

"Is there any way to get them out?" Steve wanted to know. His fingers, without him being aware of it, had torn the wet wipe to a tiny pile of damp shreds.

"Short of me cutting out a good amount of your brain tissue, or until they stop working, no," Howard said, sighing and standing up, stowing the device and his notes back into his coat. "And they'll only stop working if you die; they run on energy generated by the motion of your blood flowing. So, as you can see, unless you can manage to get yourself killed, there's no way to get them out. I haven't thought that far ahead yet."

"I see," Steve said, standing up as well and picking up his shield. "Well, I suppose that's that, then. I'd better get going, if you don't mind, see how Bucky's healing up."

"Of course, of course," Howard said, waving him off, and Steve quickly left the medical tent, wondering if there was any possibility that Howard was lying, that he could see all his thoughts at this very moment from another of his high-tech devices hidden inside his coat. Steve shook his head to clear it. He tried not to think about it as he stepped into another tent where Bucky was resting, pasted a reluctant smile on his face, and put the issue of the nanobots from his mind.

* * *

The next time he thought about them was as he was hurtling towards the icy ground and dark water of the Arctic Circle. Sure, he was thinking about Peggy and how he'd probably never see her again (and he thought probably, because surely there was some possibility), and then he got to thinking about her fondue-ing with Howard Stark in Paris, and that led him to thinking about the nanobots that Stark had implanted inside his brain.

He took a deep breath as the ice floes and dark water came rushing up at him, braced himself for impact, and wondered if this meant he was finally free.

* * *

Years later, Howard Stark carried his new baby son into the nursery he and Maria had designed especially for him. Its walls were painted a lovely, creamy blue, and it had a beautiful view of New York City with its rising skyscrapers. A nice summer breeze blew through the slightly open window, filling out the gauzy white curtains like sails, and Tony looked at the glittery buildings and the little mobile of airplanes above his head as his father set him down, gurgling happily and reaching out to try and touch them.

Howard grinned and bent down to press a soft kiss to the soft, downy curls on his son's head, and smiled as he enveloped Maria in a hug. Over her shoulder, with the smell of her jasmine perfume in his nose, he looked around the nursery, at miniature toy table designed like a motherboard circuit, plastic tools and blocks lying in tubs along the wall for when Tony was old enough to sit up by himself and play with them. Howard was determined he would be an engineer when he grew up, and had outfitted the nursery with some of his older experiments, the ones with large parts that children and babies couldn't choke on.

Unless those children and babies in question were particularly determined, he thought, as he took a glance over at the crib. Anthony, not even three days old, already had that determined set about his mouth, the very one that had made Howard fall in love with Maria.

Maria giggled against his shoulder. "This baby has more gadgets than a Samsung factory," she teased him, and Howard bent down to tickle her cheek with his mustache. "What does he even need with all this stuff anyway?" she asked, pointing towards a silver device with a huge lens and a black screen adorned with green specks connected to a monitor embedded in the wall; the monitor was projecting the pattern of green specks like spots of algae in an ocean floor aquarium. "Does that even work?"

Howard wrapped an arm around her, resting his head on top of hers as he looked at the green-spotted monitor and thought about Steve Rogers for the first time in years.

He shrugged. "I don't know if it does. But at any rate, he'll have some pretty glow in the dark lights to look at."

She nudged him in the stomach with her elbow. "That's if he ever stops trying to figure out a way to get himself up to play with the airplanes," she said, laughing. "Look! He wants to hold one."

Tony gurgled at them from his bassinet, waving his fists up in the air, and Howard smiled fondly down at his son, turning away from the monitor and any thoughts of Steve Rogers, wondering if his life could get any better than this.


	2. Of Fairy Tales and Nietzsche

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written to: [I Could Be The One - Avicii & Nicky Romero](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iob9UYFwFwk).
> 
> I've never read Thus Spoke Zarathustra - Nietzsche, but he's a famous philosopher for nihilism, which is basically the belief that nothing matters and that life doesn't have a purpose. Some pretty depressing stuff to think about.
> 
> Enjoy.  
> Misaya

  
"Maria, just look at him!" Howard said, wrapping an arm around his wife's slender shoulders and beaming down at Tony. Tony, all of four months old, barely able to sit up by himself, had managed to push a variety of differently shaped blocks into a toy box that Howard had put in front of him. "He didn't even hesitate, not once! And you know how tricky those trapezoids are. But he did such a good job, didn't you?" Howard leaned over, pressed a kiss to Tony's messy dark hair, and Tony smiled back at him from behind his pacifier, which bobbed up and down in his mouth.

"You'll be a fantastic engineer, just like me, won't you? Who's the brilliant little engineer in training?" Howard asked, tickling Tony's stomach; Tony laughed in delight, clapped his hands, dropped his pacifier on the ground. He pouted at it for a moment before picking it up and examining it.

"No, no, sweetie, don't put that back in your mouth, it's dirty now. Let Mama wash it for you, and then you can have it back," Maria said, reaching out for it.

Howard grasped her wrist as she stood up to take the pacifier to a sink. "Come on, Maria," he said, grinning up at her. "I didn't hire Jarvis for nothing."

"It's such a trivial thing," Maria muttered, tugging at the hemline of her skirt nervously. "I wouldn't want to bother him about it when I could so easily do it myself."

Howard rolled his eyes, but she could see the firm set of his jaw that indicated he was irked about something. "Well, alright, go do whatever you want. But you can be damn sure that I didn't become one of the wealthiest men in the world so that I could continue living like an ordinary person."

Before Maria could tell him not to curse in front of Tony, Howard had shouted for Jarvis. The British butler that Howard had hired (and of course he had to be British, all butlers were British, according to him) glided into the nursery with brisk steps, bowed to Howard, gave a gentle smile and nod to Maria before asking Howard what it is the master wished for.

"Bring up a tumbler of Scotch for me, if you don't mind. On the rocks," he said, flicking his wrist to indicate Jarvis was dismissed. Jarvis nodded, though Howard had already turned back to watching Tony empty the box out and start banging the coloured blocks around as he tried to fit them into the holes.

"Anything for the mistress?" Jarvis asked, turning to her. "Would you like me to wash that for you, or give you a new one for the young master?" he asked, pointing to the pacifier in her hand.

Maria forced a smile, shook her head. "No, thank you," she said, briefly wondering if she ought to bring up the subject of why drinking at two in the afternoon - and in front of a child - wasn't good. She decided quickly that it was probably best not to bring it up, not when Howard's back was just stiff lines and tension underneath his burgundy vest and shirtsleeves.

She supposed she could tell Tony - if he were to ask when he got older - that his daddy just had a penchant for apple juice. Apple juice that didn't smell particularly good and that burned the throat when it went down. Although, judging by the determined look in her son's eyes as he banged a green pyramid into a hole, he wouldn't be that easy to convince, and she wondered how old he would be before he started questioning her about it.

She wondered what she'd say then, or if by that point Howard would already have sobered up and come down from the high he seemed to have been on ever since Stark Industries had taken off and become one of the world's most influential businesses. She hoped that would be the case; at any rate, Howard and Tony seemed to be getting along rather well, she thought, as Howard scooted himself over to lean against the base of the bassinet and loosened his tie.

* * *

Later that afternoon, as the sun was casting long shadows across New York's skyscrapers and setting the building windows afire with reds and golds and oranges, Maria cradled Tony in her lap and read him a fairy tale.

"And do you know what the princess did then?" she asked Tony, who looked up at her with huge dark eyes, his pacifier bobbing in his mouth as he sucked and looked at her questioningly. "Not even a guess?" she asked teasingly, smoothing wisps of dark hair away from his forehead and pressing a kiss to the crown of his head. He smelled like formula and milk and baby, and Maria grinned as she turned the page. Tony slapped his hands on the paper, pointing at the colourful pictures with pudgy fingers.

"Maria."

Howard's voice came soft across the nursery, but Maria flinched at the tone it held. As he approached, his steps a little shaky, Maria caught the sharp whiff of alcohol advancing in front of him. She let the book fall to the nursery carpet, its large text and pictures open for Howard to see. He toed it away with disgust and plopped himself down, cross-legged, in front of the two of them.

Maria held Tony close to her, but Tony, all of four months, smiled in delight at his father and reached out for him with chubby hands. Howard took him in his arms and opened another book, the title of which contained "Thus," from the brief glance Maria caught of it before Howard bent it over his knee and began to read to Tony in a droning voice slightly slurred with drink. There were no pictures in this one, and Tony pouted a bit, reached out for the other book that still lay open on the carpet, but Howard leaned over and pushed it towards Maria, out of Tony's reach.

"You can never get them started too early," he explained to her, as if what he was doing was perfectly logical, as if a four-month-old baby would in any way be interested by _Thus Spoke Zarathustra._  "Come now, Anthony," he said very sternly, "pay attention. The man who wrote this was a very influential philosopher. He's famous for the saying, 'God is dead.'"

Maria sighed and folded her hands in her lap as she watched Howard read philosophy aloud in a droning, boring voice. She wondered if it was wrong to hope that there was a God, wondered if it was wrong to hope that Tony wouldn't turn out to be anything like Howard.

Behind Maria's turned back, the blank monitor speckled with green thrummed a little bit, the green spots lighting up brilliantly for just a brief moment. When Howard looked up, the colour had all but faded away, until the monitor looked dull as always.

* * *

* * *

I heard something today.

I don't know what it was. It was a man. The voice seemed really familiar, but I don't know whose it was.

He was reading a book, I think. It didn't sound particularly uplifting. Rather depressing, actually. God is dead? That doesn't sound good.

There was another sound, also. It sounded like a baby. But that doesn't really make any sense. I don't know much about babies, but in general, I thought you were supposed to read babies picture books and fairy tales? Don't ask me. I'm not an expert.

Are you even listening? Is anyone listening? Can anyone hear me? I mean, if I heard that man and that baby, surely there must be some way they can hear me? Or is it like a one-way mirror?

I've got so many questions. I wonder if I'll hear them again. Maybe next time, I'll be able to ask them.

 


	3. Fantasy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written to: [Hey Brother - Avicii](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Cp6mKbRTQY).
> 
> Enjoy.  
> Misaya

"You really ought to stop filling his head with trash," Howard commented, leaning against the doorframe of the nursery. Maria stiffened, Tony a squirming, warm ten-month-old bundle in her arms, but didn't look up from the fantasy novel she was reading aloud. "Magic isn't real, and you oughtn't to indulge silly fantasies."

Maria kept her mouth shut about the rather extensive collection of Lord of the Rings paraphernalia that Howard had amassed in his teenage years, and still kept in the wine cellar. Frodo would have the hardest of times getting out of that one, she reflected, bottles of the finest Cabernet and Pinot Noir and Chardonnay to block his exit from the Shire. She wondered if Howard was ashamed of them, if they were reminders of a time when he had nothing and was still struggling to get by.

"He's just a child, Howard," Maria said, trying to keep her tone light and non-combative. "Surely it wouldn't be too harmful if he were allowed a few indulgences here and there along the way."

Howard must have been in a good mood that afternoon, because he just shrugged and disappeared. Maria breathed a sigh of relief as she heard his footsteps echoing down the corridor, began to read again, in a quieter voice.

* * *

 

"What's this?" she asked one evening a week or so later, when Howard plopped a fat stack of comics, still in their plastic sleeves, in front of her. The bright covers depicted a muscular blonde man, a circular shield with a star emblazoned on it hanging from his arm. There was an A on his blue mask, and Maria would never admit it, especially not in front of Howard, but the artists had depicted him with an absolutely lovely pair of legs.

"That's Captain America," Howard said, as she turned the comics over in her hands and Tony banged his plastic spoon against his tray table in the high chair beside her. "Daddy worked with him, you know," Howard informed Tony as he sat down heavily in his chair, allowed Jarvis to uncover a silver dish of steak and potatoes. "He was a hero during the war, before you were even a thought in my mind."

"What kind of work did you do with him?" Maria asked curiously, reading the summary off one of the backs of the books. She wondered if Howard featured in these.

"Am-ca?" Tony asked, looking at Howard and pointing at the comics with his spoon. Howard smiled indulgently through a mouth of steak.

"That's right, Anthony. America. Can you say it again? Cap-tain A-mer-i-ca."

Tony screwed up his face, twisting his little lips as if it would help him pronounce the syllables better. "Ca-tin Am-ca."

Howard shrugged, taking a sip of his red wine. "I suppose that's close enough. Your daddy and he were friends. Sort of. More like acquaintances than anything."

"What kind of work did you do with him?" Maria repeated patiently, turning her attention to Tony and trying to convince him to take another spoonful of mashed carrots. Tony turned his head to the side, and a thin streak of orange ended up on his cheek. Maria sighed and wiped it off with his bib.

"Well, obviously there was the super serum," Howard said, and Maria was a little irritated that this was the most civil interaction they'd had in weeks. "But that was Erskine's work, not mine. If it had been me, it certainly wouldn't have taken so long to develop, and we wouldn't have needed half of Brooklyn's electricity to introduce it into the specimen."

Of course you wouldn't, Maria thought to herself, stopping herself from rolling her eyes just in the nick of time. She only made a small hmming sound, more as a sign that she was listening than as an agreement with Howard. Howard didn't seem to notice, or if he did, didn't care.

"No, what I did with him was nanobots," Howard said, tilting his head to the side and beckoning Jarvis to pour him more wine. Maria caught Jarvis's eye as he bent over the wine glass, saw a sympathetic look there, and turned back towards Tony again. Tony had decided that his skinned grapes were quite aerodynamic, and had taken to throwing them across his tray table and onto the floor. Maria tried to persuade him to eat one instead of throwing it, but he just smiled mischievously at her (and of course she had to smile back, how could she not?) and continued working on his aim.

"They're tiny robots," Howard said, drawing her attention back to him. "They were supposed to work in thought transmission. I told Steve - that's Captain America, just a side note - that they would be used in helping understand thoughts of patients in comas as well as some sort of communication device for these people who were otherwise indisposed to talking. I mean, I had to say something good, he was such a goody two-shoes, you know? It was like we weren't even in war."

"Right," Maria said, wiping Tony's chin with his bib. Tony managed to throw a grape far enough that it bounced off Jarvis's shoe. Maria sighed apologetically, but the butler only smiled at Tony and bent down to pick up the grape.

"I was going to use them for interrogation of prisoners of war, see what they knew," Howard continued noncommittally, no longer seeming to care if Maria was listening or not. "But of course Steve wouldn't have stood for that. So that's the whole thing about the patients in the comas. It didn't end up working, though, so no love lost there. I never got a single signal from him."

At that moment, one of Tony's skinned grapes went sailing through the air, plopped straight into Howard's freshly filled wine glass, splattering red all over his crisp, white, dress shirt. Maria froze, watched the liquid seep into the starched cotton, watched an angry flush creep across Howard's face. Tony didn't seem to notice that anything was wrong, and laughed and clapped his hands at how silly and red his daddy looked.

"Howard, it was just an accident," Maria said, standing up, automatically placing herself in between her son and her husband. "He didn't mean it, did you, Tony?"

Apparently, a fresh bout of giggles from Tony didn't make it any better, and Howard pushed her aside none too gently, roughly unlatched the tray table and tossed the whole lot onto the floor, grapes rolling every which way. He grabbed Tony roughly, knocked away Maria's hands, and stomped away.

Maria looked at Jarvis with anguish, but the butler had already bent down to start wiping up smears of mashed carrot and picking up grapes. She hurried after Howard, and got to the nursery just in time to see him plop Tony down into his crib with a glare and a stern warning to "stay there until he learned to behave himself like a decent person."

Maria made a move to pick Tony up - he was starting to cry, sensing that something was wrong - but Howard grabbed her wrist harshly, and she could almost feel the bruises start to form underneath her milky skin.

"Don't you dare," he snapped at her, and she could smell the alcohol on his anger. "Bad children get punished." This was directed at Tony. "And you can't continue to encourage him like this. I have a son, not a daughter, in case you don't remember."

Maria felt her heart wrench as Howard dragged her from the nursery, and she saw Tony's little fingers reach out from the bars of his bassinet, saw his little anguished face and heard him start to cry in earnest. His wails of "Mama" were muffled by the thick wood of the nursery door as Howard snapped it closed behind them.

"He's only a child, Howard," she argued. "They need comforting and playing and snuggling, and this is not what he needs. Listen to him!"

Howard's eyes were steely as he looked at her. "You don't tell me how to raise my child," he snarled at her. "This," - he raised his arms to either side, indicating the rich decor of the corridor, "is all mine. I have made this for myself through my own hard work and dedication, and I'm not going to let you spoil that with your silly, backwards notions of childcare."

He stomped off down the corridor, and Maria felt tears prickle behind her eyes. She looked at the nursery door, behind which Tony was still crying, and broke out into full fledged sobbing as she leaned her forehead against the nursery door. She didn't enter.

* * *

 

* * *

There it was again. The man's voice. There was a woman's voice this time, too, though. She sounded sad, kind of angry, but the man was angrier. And then they left, I guess, because there was a door slamming.

There's a baby crying. It's been crying for a while now. I wonder why the man and woman don't come back...?

I'll try talking to it, but for whatever reason, I can barely form any words. My lips feel frozen, numb, so I guess I'll settle for "Ssshhhh."

...

It stopped crying. Wait. Hold up. I think it's trying to say something...?

"Mama?"

Well, I'm not your mum, that's for sure. I don't actually know who I am, where I am. But I guess I can let you pretend I'm your mum for just a little bit, so you don't keep crying. It's making my head hurt.

"Shhhh."

"Mama!"

Okay, well, you don't have to laugh. But anything's better than that horrid wailing you were doing earlier. I wonder whose kid you are? I'll have to have a stern talking to your parents some time, if I can ever get my lips to move again.


	4. Mask

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written to: [One More Down - Mandolin Orange](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVrHb8sLm3Y).
> 
> Enjoy.  
> Misaya

Maria missed going out, and, granted, Howard had never said she couldn’t go out and do grocery shopping, sit in the quiet corners of street cafes with a good book and the occasional cigarette, just so long as she didn’t track ash and the scent of smoke back into the house. But she was sick of wearing huge, dark sunglasses to cover up black eyes, red rimmed from crying, was sick of wearing long sleeved shirts and turtlenecks in the humid New York summer to hide the black and blue marks of fingers clenched tightly around flesh in drunken anger.

She was tired, above all things. She sat in front of her vanity every day, applying pancake makeup, rubbing it in circles into her skin and trying to make Howard's anger disappear like the amber liquor he tossed, burning, down his throat in the evenings and afternoons. As she looked at herself in the mirror every morning after waking up, she wondered if Howard was right, and every morning, without fail, she managed to convince herself that he was.

She was stupid, she wasn't going to deny that. She didn't have some prestigious university degree from a fancy Ivy League school like Howard did; she hadn't read various works of philosophy, like Howard had; she had no head for numbers and couldn't manage a multimillion dollar company like Howard could. She was nothing, Howard was fond of saying, and she ought to be grateful that he had rescued her from that little diner in Brooklyn where she'd been working as a waitress with no foreseeable future. 

Was she a coward? she mused as she smoothed foundation over the planes of her cheeks. She supposed she was; she would have gone to somebody, would have talked to somebody about this if she wasn't. Jarvis had tentatively skated across the subject with her one afternoon while Howard was on an international business trip, had tutted as he examined her slender wrists that still bore a circlet of black and blue.

_"Mistress, I may be a bit presumptuous in saying this," he had said, "but perhaps you ought to talk to someone about this? This is not right. I could do it for you, if you would like. Alert authorities."_

_His fingers had been smooth against her skin, had been kind and gentle, but she had flinched away all the same and told him that it wasn't any of his concern, that she was handling it._

Was she a bad mother? She didn't personally think so. Sure, she was prone to fantasies and daydreams, and enjoyed storybooks with huge pictures and text and creamy colours, but that didn't make her a bad mother, she didn't think. Tony was happy, she thought, smiling to herself behind her sunglasses as she watched him play in the sandbox with a few other toddlers. He was growing up to be a very fine boy, with a mass of dark curls on his head that tended to fall into his eyes, with an infectious smile and lovely little dimples and a knack for managing to ask at least ten questions containing the word "Why" for even the simplest of conversations. It was his favourite word. That, and "How." 

She supposed it was the scientist in him; he simply couldn't help it, not with all the science texts Howard read to him and all the electronic equipment strewn around the nursery amidst brilliantly coloured blocks and toys. She watched him play make believe with a Captain America action figure, and silently prayed that his budding sense of creativity and curiosity would never be squashed. She wasn't going to let Howard do that, she determined, her mouth set firmly. Not to her son. She might have let it happen to her, but she'd sooner throw herself off the Brooklyn Bridge than see it happen to Tony.

The only concession Howard made towards child-appropriate things was a fat stack of Captain America comics that Maria always made sure were lined carefully in Tony's bookshelf at the end of the day, spines facing out, numbers all in order. Tony loved reading the books, would convince her to lie down on the nursery floor with him while he read out loud in a high-pitched, stumbling voice that tripped over big words. He would pick up a Captain America action figure, would fly it through the air and make all the sound effects with his mouth twisted in all sorts of shapes, and Maria couldn't help but smile.

"Mama," Tony said, "is Captain America better than Superman?" 

Maria smiled down at Tony, already all of two years old and growing faster and faster by the day. Soon he'd be off to some sort of accelerated pre-school and the house would be dead quiet in the mornings; she stored the sounds of his round vowels and syllables in her memory so she wouldn't be too lonely when he inevitably went off.

"Hmm," she said, pretending to think very hard. "I don't know. What do you think?" she asked him.

"I think Captain America is better," he said quickly, as if he had been waiting for her to ask him all along. 

"Why do you say that?" she asked him, smoothing an errant curl behind his ear. She would need to take him to get a haircut soon; it was growing rather long.

"Superman is so silly," he said, as if that explained everything. "He has bunches of powers and is super strong and super fast, but if he puts on glasses and a blue shirt he isn't Superman anymore. How come, Mama? And how come no one knows he's Superman?" 

Maria smiled sadly. "Well," she said, tapping her chin thoughtfully, "I suppose he puts on a disguise so that people don't see he's Superman."

"But whyyy?" Tony asked, looking up at her curiously. "Why wouldn't he want to be Superman all the time?"

Maria shrugged. "Maybe Superman is very sad," she said. "He probably misses his home - because Superman's not from this planet, remember? He's from somewhere far off. He probably misses his home and his mum and dad, but he doesn't want anyone to know he's sad, because he's supposed to protect them, so he has to put on glasses and a blue shirt and they make him feel better." 

Tony frowned, processing the information. "I guess," he said unsurely, after a long pause. "But I still think he's very silly."

Maria smiled, leaning over to press a soft kiss to Tony's forehead. "Yes," she agreed. "I think he is very silly, also."

* * *

I'm starting to hear things all the time now. I wish I could tell you why, or how, or who they are, or even what's going on. I'm not even sure if these voices are real, or if they're just some auditory hallucinations or the like. 

I don't remember a lot. I know my name is Steve Rogers; I know I couldn't go to war because of the draft and my physical condition, my reports all stamped across with big, glaring F's; I was born on July 4, 1920 in Brooklyn; my dad, Joseph, died when I was a kid, so I don't remember much of him; and my mum died when I was...fifteen? because she had pneumonia. My best friend is Bucky Barnes; he got selected to fight, of course he did, Buck was always good like that, perfect, strong physique, smart, intelligent, had a way with the girls.

I wonder where I am? Maybe it's a set of recurring dreams that somehow make progress every night.

That woman really does sound sad, though. She cries a lot after she puts her son to bed (I'm pretty sure it's her son, unless Tony is a girl's name now), when she thinks nobody can hear. I want to tell her that I can hear her, but my lips are still kind of stiff. I've been trying to mouth words, but it's still rather hard to move my mouth and tongue around to form the sounds.

She was talking about Superman and a man named Captain America with her son today. I've heard of Superman, sure, every kid's heard of Superman, but who's this Captain America fellow? He sounds like a great guy, really patriotic, really knows what this country's all about.

I wonder what his civilian name is? It's probably something cool. With a superhero name like that, it has to be cool. 


	5. The Whisper Man Likes Flowers

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written to: [Hoppipolla - Sigur Ros](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnAwPeqrdAk).
> 
> enjoy.  
> Misaya

Howard wondered where he'd gone wrong. He could see the flinches behind Maria's rigidly held shoulders and perfect posture every time he reached out for her to stroke her cheek, to smooth back errant strands of hair that were falling over her forehead. He knew it was wrong, what he was doing, that the bruises and the angry fingerprints left all over her wrists and hips weren't accidental.

It wasn't him, though, he swore it wasn't, couldn't have been him. He loved Maria more than anything in the world, but he needed the liquor, he needed it to deal with his anxiety and paranoia and he thought if she could just accept that, they wouldn't have anything to worry about. He didn't recognise the person he was when he was drowning in an open bottle, but he was pretty damn sure that it wasn't him. Maria didn't seem able to tell the difference, and slowly, but surely, she was growing away from him. He despised it.

And so Howard threw himself into his work, into Stark Industries, watched its stock rise to exponential levels. Watched the numbers tick into his bank account in first a trickle, then a gush, then a positively massive deluge of dollars that as a young child he never would have thought possible, never would have thought that anybody in the world could have so much money, never would have thought that he would own even a fraction of what he did. His workers complimented him on his brilliance, his customers and clients told him how innovative he was, how he would surely make it onto Time Magazine as Person of the Year before too long.

And that was all fine and good, Howard thought to himself as he sat in his favourite armchair by the library fire and stared moodily into a snifter of brandy, but unfortunately the only person that really mattered to him didn't seem to see this. But he needed this, he thought to himself as he mulled the brandy around in his mouth, wincing at the burn as it slipped down his throat. He couldn't imagine not having this, and he couldn't imagine not having Maria.

He loved her, really he did, but she would lie underneath him at nights when he was making love to her, would stare up at some point on the ceiling just over his left shoulder, and more often than not he would just roll off her and lie on his side. Sometimes he heard her crying quietly to herself when she thought he was already asleep, and he wished he still knew how to comfort her.

Tony seemed to be the only one who could do that these days.

And that was another thing: his son. Howard could see himself in Tony's dark eyes, in the curve of his smile, in the dark curls that flew every which way as Tony ran about the nursery, examining all Howard's old and/or broken inventions or pretending to be Captain America.

"You can't be Captain America," Howard had pointed out one day, and he'd felt so incredibly bad and sorry and regretful as Tony's eyes had filled up with tears and his lower lip had started to quiver. "It's just that you're not blonde and tall yet," Howard quickly tried to amend, but it was already too late, the damage had been done, and Tony screwed up his face and began to wail.

Maria quickly ran into the nursery, got down on her knees to hug Tony to her and whisper soothing words into his ears. Howard sighed, rubbed his temples; Tony's crying wasn't doing any wonders for his hangover, and he quickly left.

* * *

He wasn't quite sure how to communicate with his son, this young human creature who looked so much like him. Often when Jarvis picked Tony up from school, walking with him the few blocks from his kindergarten, Tony's Captain America backpack slung over his shoulder and Tony's tiny hand clasped in his own, Tony would get into the apartment, kick off his shoes by the door, and would run upstairs to find his mama. Sometimes he would glance over at Howard in his study and say "Hi," with the sweet burbling cheerfulness only a child of four can have, but Howard rarely replied, lost already in a tumbler of whiskey, and Tony's tiny introductions came less and less and finally began to stop altogether.

For the most part, Howard acknowledged Tony, gave him little harrumphs and nods whenever he saw him running around in the halls of the apartment, and for the most part, Tony would try to avoid Howard in a constant, childish game of hide and seek. He didn't particularly understand this man he was supposed to call Daddy, but his mama had told him that that man really was his Daddy and he was supposed to call him that, and his mama was usually right about these sorts of things.

"But Mama," he asked her one evening, when she and Jarvis had come to see his kindergarten open house - Howard was conspicuously absent, though Maria was sure she had left no less than twenty reminders about the open house stuck on Post-It notes around the apartment. "Daddies are supposed to come to open houses. So Jarvis must be my daddy!"

Jarvis tutted as Maria turned her head slightly, trying not to let the sudden flood of tears that pressed against her eyelids to fall. "Young Master Stark," Jarvis said, politely not looking at Maria while she composed herself, "let me tell you, if I were your father, surely you wouldn't have that unruly haircut and you would already have mastered the noble game of chess by now."

Tony giggled brightly as Jarvis tickled him fiercely under the chin, his face crinkling in an agreeable smile as Jarvis picked him up and suggested they have a spot of ice cream to celebrate the young master's academic achievements. Maria blotted her eyes with a handkerchief, sniffed a bit as she scooped up Tony's drawing of a flower, and followed the two out the door.

She wondered what Howard was doing, why he hadn't come, and then decided that it was better not to know.

* * *

"Put my picture up there," Tony commanded, pointing to a blank spot on the nursery wall next to the giant black and green TV monitor. Since he'd grown up, they had moved the crib into storage and had replaced it with a small bed with Captain America sheets per Tony's incessant requests.

Maria smiled at her son, reached out and ruffled his hair; it really was rather wild, she mused. Perhaps Jarvis was right; she ought to go and get him a haircut sometime soon.

"I didn't hear a please," she teased him, and Tony gasped in indignance before squealing in laughter as she tickled him.

"Please, please, Mama," he said, breathless with laughter. "I want the picture to go there, please."

"Much better," she said with a small smile, before leaning over, peeling off a few pieces of tape from a roll, and sticking the flower to the wall. "Why do you want it here?" she asked, as she smoothed the lines of tape with her thumbnail. "You won't be able to see it very well, because the light comes in from the window here."

"I want the whisper man to see it," Tony explained, already lying on the floor and poring over a Captain America comic.

"The whisper man?" Maria asked, not really paying attention. "Who is the whisper man? Your imaginary friend?"

"He's not imaginary, Mama," Tony said, looking at her, affronted. "He whispers at night, shhh, shhh, shh, that's what he says."

"Mm. Is that right?" Maria said, smiling at her son and wondering if the window shutters weren't closing properly. "He just whispers at you?"

"Yeah," Tony said, nodding vigorously. "He says that all the time."

Maria smiled, reached out to ruffle Tony's hair, and thanked whatever gods there were that her son still had the capacity to imagine.

* * *

_The Whisper Man. That's what the little boy calls me. I guess it's a kind of cool name, but it makes me feel like a rapist or a child molester. Or something like that._

_He talks a lot, this kid. His name is Tony Stark, and his mum's name is Maria, and his dad's name is Howard. He says his daddy makes lots of electronic things, that he's super smart, but he doesn't come to his open houses and doesn't like flowers and that sometimes he makes his mum cry. That doesn't sound like a very good father to me, in my opinion, but what can I say? My dad was an alcoholic and died when I was still a kid. I don't really remember him._

_Tony says he has a butler. Or a butter. But that wouldn't make sense, so I'm assuming he has a butler named Jarvis, instead of a dairy product by the same name. I wonder what it's like to be rich enough to have a butler._

_This Tony kid sometimes reads to me, or at least I think he's reading to me. He reads me comics, from what it sounds like, and he does all the sound effects too. He's a big fan of this Captain America fellow, and never forgets to tell me that his daddy told him he worked with Captain America._

_Today he told me, long after his mum tucked him in, that he put up a picture for me to see. I couldn't see it, of course, but I made a shhh sound that I think sounded curious, and reassuring. I hope that one day this Stark kid can make something so that my thoughts can get transferred into words, that would be really convenient since he seems the only person I can communicate with. And he seems rather bright, so it surely can't be too much to hope for._

_Why does the name Howard Stark sound so familiar? I'll have to remember to ask that._


	6. Marks

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note: The term 'Holocaust' was used in regards to Nazis in 1933 after a major book burning. It was used after World War II to refer to the genocide. In the timeframe of this story, Steve is still mentally 'stuck' in ~1940 or thereabouts; as such, Steve has no idea as of yet what exactly happened in WWII after his crash, nor of any other major events in US/World History since then.

Tony had just freshly turned seven and finished his first quarter of third grade when his report card came in. It was a brisk October evening, and the brilliant, bright lights of New York shone into his bedroom window while he hummed to himself and read The Whisper Man a Captain America comic. Once in a while, the Whisper Man would whisper back, "shh shh shh" at a particularly interesting part, like when the Captain punched Hitler right in the nose and sent him running, with his silly square mustache all in disarray. Tony giggled at that part too, but he didn't know who Hitler was. Some bad man, he thought, though he had the same mustache as Charlie Chaplin in those black and white films that Tony liked to watch with his mama. 

But this Hitler fellow looked rather mean, Tony thought, and not like Charlie Chaplin at all. The words the artists had given him had a lot of -tsch endings, and it was very hard to pronounce, but Tony tried his best to replicate him so that the Whisper Man could hear also. 

His parents were out for the evening, on something called an 'anna-versry.' Tony had no idea who Anna was, and wasn't really sure that he cared. His parents were probably at some fancy restaurant drinking that disgusting red stuff that came in the green bottles (Tony had snuck a taste once, just a little sip, and had afterwards desperately begged Jarvis for a cup of milk, and then another one after that) and eating disgusting grown-up food that didn't even come in interesting shapes. 

Jarvis had tried to explain to him that anna-versries were things that adults did after they got married, and that they did it every year. Tony was horrified by this; how could adults stand eating boring, non-shaped food and drinking disgusting red stuff that looked kind of like Kool-Aid but wasn't? He firmly told Jarvis that if that were the case, he would never get married. 

"Is that right, young master?" Jarvis asked, his eyes twinkling as he stirred a pot of macaroni and cheese - with superhero themed macaroni noodles - for Tony. "You don't ever want to get married? Not ever?" 

Tony frowned down at his steamed broccoli, shoving a little tree in his mouth and demolishing the florets. Jarvis tutted at him in disapproval, even as Tony smiled up at him with green between his teeth. 

"Not ever," he said with a mouth full of broccoli. "I don't wanna get married and have anna-versries. Can't I just stay here with you and eat macaroni and cheese all the time?" 

"What if you find a strapping young lass - or lad - that you want to get married to?" Jarvis asked, bringing over a bowl of macaroni and cheese. "Then you'll want to have things besides macaroni and cheese on your anniversaries with them." Jarvis sighed and brushed a fatherly hand over Tony's unruly hair as the little boy dug eagerly into his bowl of noodles. "Although I am flattered that the young master would like to spend the rest of his life with me eating cheap noodles from a box." 

"I don't wanna marry anyone," Tony said firmly, reaching for his glass of milk and taking a sip. "Never ever." 

Jarvis smiled at Tony's childishness, and didn't even say anything when Tony put his elbows on the table and continued to eat. 

* * *

Howard was in a rather good mood as he pulled into the apartment building's garage. He had easily gone through a whole bottle of wine by himself, and he was feeling rather nice. Maria hadn't flinched away from his touch even once, and she'd oohed and aahed properly, like a good wife should, at the expensive diamond necklace he'd bought for her. 

It was really a beautiful thing, he thought to himself as he watched her get out of the car, admired the sparkle of seven expertly laid diamonds glittering across the lines of her collarbones. The seven diamonds were arrayed, three small ones on the edges, growing increasingly bigger towards the centre, until the biggest diamond laid directly in the hollow of Maria's throat. 

But it wasn't nearly as beautiful as her gentle smile, and Howard hoped, prayed, believed that he could make it work again.

* * *

"I'll just get the mail quickly, and then I'll be up," Howard told her, and Maria smiled, nodded, and pressed the button for the lift that would take her up to their penthouse apartment. 

Howard hummed to himself as he slotted his mail key into the box, missing on the first try - but that was expected, he had, after all, gone through a whole bottle of wine by himself - and laughed at his clumsiness. He got it on the second try, pulled out some assorted bills, some junk mail, and a sealed envelope from Tony's elementary school. 

Howard turned it over in his hands, slitting it open with the edge of his key. He tugged the paper out of the envelope, shook out the folds with one hand, and read it to himself as he stepped into the lift. 

His expression grew stonier and stonier as the floors ticked by. 

* * *

"'Talks a lot in class, is somewhat mischievous in a cunning, amusing way,'" Howard read to Maria, and his dead tone of voice was sobering in that Maria had no idea how to read it at all. 

"'His grades are good: Outstanding in History, Outstanding in Language Arts, he can type 78 words a minute.'"

Maria still had no idea what the issue was here, but she felt her good humour quickly evaporating. The diamond necklace suddenly felt extremely cold and sharp against her throat. 

"Guess what mark he got in maths. Guess." 

When she remained silent, Howard upended a table next to her. She gasped as the glass front of the table smashed into a million tiny shards with the force of his rage. 

"Damn it, woman, I told you to guess!" he shouted at her.

"...Satisfactory?" she asked, her voice no louder than a whimper. 

Howard slammed the paper down on the glass coffee table in front of her, and for a moment Maria envisioned the glass of the table shattering, pushing their diamond-sharp ways into Howard's hand, making deadly paths through his veins and straight to his heart...

"Passing!" Howard roared, his finger jabbing at the 'P' on the card. "He's just passing! You tell me, Maria, how such a brilliant little boy can be so damn stupid! Is he even my son?" 

Cowed by the force of his anger, Maria hugged her elbows and didn't say anything. That was when Howard turned his anger on her. 

"Is he even my son?" he screamed, and this was getting outrageous, really, couldn't he see that Tony was the spitting image of him? "No son of mine could be so horrid at simple, basic arithmetic! I'm going to get a paternity test, see if I don't!" 

Maria trembled and wondered how she could possibly placate her husband, wondered how she could save Tony from his father's fury as the diamonds pressed cold and unforgiving into her skin. 

* * *

Tony had been reading to the Whisper Man when his parents had come home. He had gotten to a particularly exciting part with Captain America's loyal sidekick, Bucky Barnes, when he heard his father begin to yell. 

"Hold on," he said, apologetically; it was rather rude to stop at an exciting part of the comic, and he was sure the Whisper Man was a bit irked by that, but he wanted to hear what his father was shouting about this time. 

His heart froze in his chest as he heard his father shouting his name. Something about passing, and tests, and grades. A huge smash and crashing as something fell over.

Tony listened, straining his ears in the sudden silence that followed, before a door slammed and footsteps began to stomp up the stairs. Fear made his heart leap into his throat, and he hurriedly turned out the desk light, shoved the comic haphazardly back into its shelf, and told the Whisper Man to be quiet. 

The footsteps were beating rapidly down the corridor as Tony flung himself into bed, drawing the blue comforter up over his head and trembling as he squeezed his eyes tight shut, hoping his father wouldn't come in. 

The heavy footsteps stopped outside his bedroom door, and Tony thought that perhaps his father wouldn't. His hopes were quickly dashed as the door slowly creaked open. 

Tony held his breath, trying not to shiver under his covers, and strained his ears trying to listen for his father's footsteps across his bedroom carpet. Where could he be? Tony wondered. 

A few very, too-long minutes passed, in which Tony prayed to any higher being in the universe that his father would go away, when he heard the door begin to creak closed again and then shut with a soft click. He waited a few moments before letting out a deep sigh of relief before tossing off the covers and making to go back to his desk. 

Howard's glare met him the instant he flung off the comforter, and he couldn't help but scream. 

* * *

_The little boy really loves to read comics to me. Always Captain America, never anyone else._

_Captain America fights Hitler. Bonks him straight in the nose. Can you imagine that? I would laugh if I could, but I can't. I can only make this shh, shhing noise that stutters kind of like laughing._

_But really, what a straight up guy. Fighting Hitler. I remember him, broadcast all over televisions with his rousing German speeches and his talks about deportation of non-Aryan races and that funny little square mustache. He wanted to build a bigger, better Germany after their horrid defeat in World War I, I guess, and that Treaty of Versailles that really kind of screwed Germany over.  
_

_Tony read to me about the Holocaust, and he said it was a really, really bad thing that not even his mama would tell him about. I don't think it's a really, super horrible thing, book burning; I mean, yeah, it is pretty bad, but I can't imagine it being so bad that his mum didn't want to tell him about it.  
_

_Then he went off to eat dinner - superhero mac and cheese, he told me when he got back - and continued to read to me._

_Then all of a sudden, he told me to be very quiet, and so I obliged him, even though he had stopped at a really cliffhanger-ish part of the comic._

_I can't hear anything._

_..._

_A scream._

_"No, Daddy, no, stop, stop, stop!"_

_Or that's what it sounded like, anyway. He was crying too hard, and there was a great deal of yelling and smacking and heavy things falling over. I wanted to say something, tried to say something, anything, but I could only make those stupid little shh shh sounds that I'm sure no one heard anyway over all that noise.  
_

_He's only just left, Tony's dad, slamming the door behind him. Tony sounds like he's crying, but it's sort of far away like he's not at his desk, which he says is where he is when he reads to me._

_"Shhhh, shhhh," I try to tell him, and he just tells me to "Go away, Whisper Man, I don't want to talk to you right now," and that is that._


	7. Times

Ever since the incident with Tony's 'passing' marks in math, Howard Stark had withdrawn further and further into himself, like a turtle pulling itself into his shell. He absolutely refused to believe that that little dark-haired child upstairs in the bedroom with the Captain America bedsheets was his son, that somewhere along the way he'd been replaced through some mad government scandal or something of the like. And though Maria had a gentle talk with Tony an hour or so after his father had stormed out of his room, banging the door closed behind him, even though Tony's marks in math were improving at a rapid, impressive pace, Howard still refused to believe that there wasn't something inherently wrong with Tony. 

Whenever Maria tentatively tried to broach the subject with Howard, on good nights when he wasn't blind drunk and raving at the ceiling about governmental conspiracies and intelligence agencies that Maria had no idea about, he would just sigh, turn over and face her, his dark eyes holes in his face. 

"The boy has no direction," he said, whenever she tried to talk to him about Tony. "I don't know, Maria. Sometimes I just don't know what I'm going to do. Stark Industries needs a successor, and I'm not so sure I want to entrust my multibillion-dollar company to someone who doesn't have the motivation to keep it going and will only run it dry to the ground with his fantasies and what have you." 

Maria wanted to protest that Tony did have a direction, but that he was only seven years old and wasn't quite ready to explicitly state what that particular direction was, but Howard always cut her off before she could get a word in edgewise. 

"You think too highly of the child," Howard said, an air of finality in his voice that signaled the conversation was over. "He'll never get anywhere in life if he has his head in the clouds and can't bring himself back down to work at sums and integrals. You need that to be an engineer, and no son of mine is going to be anything but that. You understand, Maria?" 

No, she wanted to say, she didn't understand what his obsession was with making sure Tony knew how to derive the circumference of a circle or the volume of a cylinder. She didn't understand this mad need to focus solely on math, math, math, didn't understand why Howard frowned at the parent teacher conferences Maria forced him to go to whenever Tony's teacher smiled and praised Tony's vivid imagination and creativity. Maybe it was the very fact that she forced him to go to these things; she just wanted the appearance of a solid, supportive family unit, and Howard certainly couldn't present that image locked up in his study with a bottle of cognac, now could he? At least in that one area he'd agreed with her: he needed to maintain a positive image to keep the company's stock in good shape, to maintain a competent appearance for his professional life. 

"So what you mean to tell me is," Howard said, interrupting the teacher's gushing praise about Tony's summarisation skills, "is that you place much more emphasis on the humanities."

"Well, you see," the teacher began, but Howard cut her off. Maria shot a sideways glance at him, but he didn't look back at her. 

"Where is the arithmetic? Where are the integrals, and the derivatives, and surface areas? Do you teach computer science, coding, programming? Python, C, C++?" 

The teacher looked dumbfounded, and Maria really felt for her. She was a young girl, probably just fresh out of school herself, and she still had that rosy-cheeked, bright-eyed look that showed she was - or tried to be - optimistic about the world and everyone in it. She was far too young to truly understand pain and fear and anger, and Maria shot her an apologetic look that she didn't seem to catch. 

"Er, no, Mr. Stark, they are only in third grade -" 

Howard sighed in disgust, shook his head, muttered something derogatory about the American education system, and even from this angle, Maria could see the beginnings of tears forming in the girl's eyes. 

"At any rate," Maria said cheerfully, too cheerfully, too forced, "we're glad to know Tony's doing well in school. If you have any pressing concerns about his work, please don't hesitate to call us." 

And with that, she took Howard's hand and dragged him out of the classroom. The teacher was far too glad to see them go.

* * *

Howard would not speak to Tony for two years. 

* * *

"So can you say anything other than 'shh'?" Tony wanted to know, sitting at his desk and doing a math worksheet. He was his times tables and kept getting stuck on the 12s, and the Whisper Man was being no help at all, being that he could only say 'shhh'. 

"Shh."

"Yeah, can you say anything besides that?" 

"Shh." 

Tony groaned in frustration and stared at his times tables worksheet in despair. The 12s were so tricky; he always got caught up with 12 times 11. 

"But you understand me, don't you?" 

"Shh." This one sounded slightly affirmative, but that might just have been Tony's imagination. Tony frowned 

Tony frowned up at the black monitor speckled with green spots that hung above his desk, fiddled with the small instrument on his bookshelf, the huge lens reflecting light onto the opposite wall. The Whisper Man spoke through that, he was sure of it, because when he whispered the green spots would light up a little bit brighter and move around. 

"Okay. One shh for yes, two shhs for no. Okay? Do you understand?" 

"Shh." 

"Can you say anything besides shh?" 

"Shh shh." 

Tony frowned. "But you can think of other things besides shh, right?" 

"Shh." 

"...Can you help me with my math homework?" Tony asked, looking up at the screen hopefully. The green dots lit up, swirled around, stopped. 

"Shhhh...?" This one sounded questioning, almost as if someone were saying, "Sure...?" like they weren't very sure they could but would most certainly try. Tony took it as encouraging. 

"Okay. Good. Can you remind me what 12 times 11 is? 121?" 

There was a brief pause, the green dots swirling frantically on the screen. "Shh shh." 

"132?" 

"Shh." 

Tony beamed, writing the answer down in the little box. "Thanks, Whisper Man, you're the greatest." 

"Shh." 

* * *

_Before Tony went to bed, he told me that he would have to try to figure out a way so that I could talk to him, because this whole 'shh'ing business was really getting rather boring. I can't help but agree, and I'm very glad that he didn't ask me to try to count 'shh's to help him with his math homework. The mere thought of trying to 'shh' 132 times is frightening; I can feel my lips drying out already._

_Not that I can feel my lips. I still can't. I just assume they're there._

_He said I was the greatest. I don't know if you heard, but if you didn't, you'll just have to take my word for it._

_It makes me feel all fuzzy inside, warmer than I've felt in a long time._

_Tony tells me a lot about his dad, and about his dad's company, and about how his dad is scary and frightens him a lot and likes to drink the brown stuff from the funny glass bottles. His dad wants him to be an engineer, or so Tony said, and engineers have to be super super good at math._

_I really do hope Tony figures out some way so that I can talk to him, in words instead of 'shhs.' I can't imagine I'll be particularly helpful when it comes to trying to help him with derivatives or what have you, if I'm just sshing all the time._

_I wonder if I still remember maths from school? I'll have to check. It's not like I'm short on time or anything._

 

 

 


	8. The Most Precious Things

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Today is my birthday.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written to: [Signal Fire - Snow Patrol](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwyESYGFnJ8).
> 
> Enjoy.  
> Misaya

The next time Howard talked to Tony, it was because Tony wanted to, and because Howard had run out of excuses and was too tired to think of a new one for why he couldn't see or talk to his son. 

Tony was ten. 

"Father," Tony said, peeking around the corner of the study door, peeping in at his father. Howard was sitting at his desk, staring into a swirling tumbler of whiskey and wondering where he'd gone wrong in his life. Stark Industries was doing better than ever, its stock rocketing through the roof at an almost alarming pace. Though it had ended a decade and a half ago, the war in Vietnam was still fresh in everybody's minds, compacted even more by the fear of the Soviets and nuclear weapons that no one saw but everybody talked about. Stark Industries now worked primarily in defence, but under the surface, if one bothered to look just the slightest bit past the politics and the bullshit, one could easily see that the company was all offensive. 

It made Howard's head hurt, looking at his fleets of engineers tightening nuts and bolts on high-tech rifles, looking at his scientists in the labs in their sterile white coats holding up tubes of bacteria that, if given the chance, would decimate entire races. It made him feel sick, the power he held in the palm of his hand; he was tired of playing God, and tried to drown himself in alcohol, but didn't seem to be able to sink under deep enough. 

And then there was Maria, and the boy, of course. He had taken to calling himself Tony, instead of a proper gentleman's name like Anthony; Maria had shrunk away from him, and Howard could feel the cold column of mattress between her body and his as they slept together at night. He hadn't lifted a hand against her, not in a very long time. 

Howard hated to admit it, but he was tired. He was just too damn tired, and felt like all he was really doing was dying. 

"Father." 

Tony's repeated address made him look up. The boy was getting tall, shooting up like a beanpole, but the childish roundness hadn't left his face yet. Howard squinted past the afternoon sunlight painting Tony's face, and in that moment, he saw a tall young man, dressed in a sharp tuxedo, tugging at the corner of a well groomed mustache with one hand, a glass of champagne in the other. It was him. It was not him. And Howard had no idea about supernatural things, didn't think they existed, refused to believe in premonitions, but he would swear that in that instant, he had seen the man his son would grow up to be. 

"I want to learn how to program." 

Howard was startled by this. Tony hadn't shown any interest at all in the technical subjects, sneering at computer science books, rolling his eyes at derivatives and integrals (though Howard was surprised and pleased by how quickly he picked up the fundamentals of differential calculus), and had instead been more inclined towards the humanities. Howard had eventually given up, and the science texts and clinical papers collected dust in neat piles in the corners of Tony's room. 

"And I want a tool kit, and access to materials." 

Howard stared at his son in disbelief, wondering what could possibly have prompted the change. Surely it couldn't have been Maria's doing. 

"I - what kind of materials?" he stuttered, clearing his throat and eyeing his son with bloodshot eyes. 

"Pipes, tubes, electrical wiring, stuff like that. Science stuff," Tony said, chewing at his nails and wondering if he had pushed his father too far. 

There was a long pause during which Howard pinched his thigh under the table to make sure he wasn't dreaming. He wasn't, and winced as the sharp sting traveled up his leg. 

"Yes, you may," he said after a while. "But you must always make sure to have Jarvis escort you to the laboratory. I will make sure to keep it well stocked." 

Tony nodded his head, smiling in satisfaction. That had been a lot less problematic than he thought it would have been. And maybe now he could make The Whisper Man talk again. 

* * *

Tony pored over the computer science manuals that his father had given him, reading up on Python, Java, C++, everything. His father had delegated one of his employees to be a CS tutor for Tony, and every day after school, Tony would spend at least two hours with Ms. Peggy Carter, a woman in her sixties or seventies, her dark hair mostly white. She had laugh lines around her eyes, and wrinkles around her mouth, and Tony liked how she always kept butterscotch candies in her pockets and gave them to him when he had completed a particularly difficult coding task. She told Tony that she had once used to be a friend of his father's, back during the war, when Howard's hair was still all dark and he didn't have silver at his temples, when he didn't have worry lines around his face. 

She told him that, after a person very important to her had disappeared, she had picked up coding as a hobby, as a way to hide her emotions behind the impersonal facades of numbers and binary numerals. Tony wondered who the important person was, and Ms. Carter showed him an old, faded picture she kept in her wallet of a strong blonde man. He looked like a very nice man, Tony thought to himself, but Ms. Carter never told him what his name was. Just that he had been a very good friend, and that Ms. Carter had liked him very much. 

With Ms. Carter, Tony learned the ins and outs of computer science, how to create infinite loops, how to create signals and pathways of coding and solutions where none existed. 

Once Ms. Carter had asked him why he wanted to learn all of a sudden. And Tony had thought about The Whisper Man, had smiled brightly up at Ms. Carter, and had told her that he wanted the Whisper Man to be able to talk again.

And Ms. Carter had smiled indulgently down at him, her laugh crinkling the corners of her eyes, and had told him his parents must be blessed to have a boy with such a vivid imagination. Tony didn't correct her. 

* * *

The evening he plugged the little screen and lens apparatus into a computer, he was confronted with a login screen password. 

Username: HStark. 

Password: _________

Tony frowned, tapping at the keyboard unsurely. He hesitantly tried a few words. Whiskey? Alcohol? Stark? What would his father like? None of the passwords worked, and he frowned at the screen. 

His father had made these things during the war, he thought to himself, and maybe he hadn't been into drinking then. He sighed, frowned, and decided he would ask his father about it tomorrow. 

* * *

Howard looked at Tony blearily, trying to get over a hideous hangover. 

"Whaddaya want?" he slurred at his son, trying very hard not to vomit all over his desk. 

"The password to the lens and drive in my room," Tony said, very quietly, so as not to aggravate his father's headache. "You know, the one under the monitor with all the green specks." 

Howard groaned, rubbed at his eyes with his hands, rummaged around his desk for a pad of paper and a pen. In shaky handwriting, he scribbled something down, folded the paper and handed it to Tony, who took it but didn't unfold it. 

"It's the things most precious to me," Howard muttered, gripping the edge of his desk and thinking very hard about pleasant things, peaceful things. Waterfalls, kittens, ohms and circuits and motherboards...

* * *

Username: HStark.

Password: M4r14 4NTH0NY ST4RK 

* * *

 

Tony grinned as the drive took his password, allowed him to open up his programs and run them. He looked up at the green specks, how they started swirling around curiously, then more quickly. 

 _Hello_? the screen read out. 

Tony had to bite his cheek from squealing in delight. Only babies did that, and he was already a big boy. 

"Hi, Whisper Man," he said in delight. 

There was a pause while the green specks frantically darted around the screen. 

_You can see this?_

"Yes! I can! It worked, Whisper Man, I did it! You can talk now!" 

_I could always talk._

"Well, I can see it now. So now you don't have to shh anymore. Though I guess you'll need a new name then." 

_I have a name._

"You do?" Tony asked. "What is it?"

_I'm Steve._

"My name is Tony!" Tony crowed proudly, grinning from ear to ear. If he was looking carefully, he would swear the monitor's speckles rearranged themselves into a smile. 

_Yes. I know._

 


	9. Pepper

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The date is 1992, Tony is 13 years old, and is a freshman in high school. 
> 
> Written to: [Up and Up (Acoustic) - Relient k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tti5ZVUrik0).
> 
> Enjoy.  
> Misaya

"I'm going to high school tomorrow, Steve! Can you believe it?" Tony said with glee as he sat in front of his monitor and talked to Steve. His bedroom windows were open, and a soft late summer breeze was sifting through the windows, making the white curtains billow out towards Tony and tickle his bare ankles with their silky touch. Just this year, Tony had managed to sit in his swivel chair, all the way back, with his feet touching the floor. He'd made Maria measure him against the wall where she'd marked his height every year with a light little pencil, and this year both of them had been vastly surprised to find that he'd hit five feet without anyone noticing. He was growing all the time, shooting up all straight and skinny like a string bean, all elbows and knees, and Maria smiled at the too-short hems on his jeans and the too-small shoes discarded in his closet, and told him that he would have to decide on a final height so they could buy school clothes for him. 

He'd been accepted to the United Nations International School in Queens. Maria had helped him work on the application, staying up late to help proofread his essays, crossing out grammatical errors and spelling mistakes, making small suggestions to where he ought to place his sentences for maximum effect. Howard had approved, but only because a well-rounded high school experience would look good on university applications, and he had more than enough money to cover the $30,000 tuition fee. Howard had been Time Magazine's Man of the Year for 1991, where the headline had described him as a benevolent innovator who had made the technology of today possible. 

Maria had bought a copy of the magazine to frame, and the instant Howard had seen it hanging on their bedroom wall, he had smashed it on the ground and ripped up the pages. 

He wasn't a good man, and he knew it. The Time photographers had concealed the dark purple bags under his eyes with heavy layers of foundation, had covered up the wrinkles that layered his forehead and the corners of his mouth with concealer. Stark Industries was a booming firm, that was definitely true, but if anybody knew what the scientists were really producing in their labs, if anybody knew what the engineers were exploding deep in the middle of uninhabited deserts...well, they might have to reconsider the magazine's cover person. Howard couldn't sleep at night for the visions of mushroom clouds and hydrogen bombs tattooed on the insides of his eyelids. Hiroshima, Nagasaki, closer than anybody in America realised...

 _Are you excited?_ The screen read out, and Tony grinned at it. 

"Of course I'm excited, Steve! I got placed in Honours Biology, and guess who's in that class with me?"

_Who?_

"He's got a fuddy duddy name," Tony said, checking his backpack once, twice, thrice to make sure he had all the necessary school supplies for tomorrow. "It's like James Rupert. But everybody calls him Rhodey. He's my friend!" 

_Is that right? That's good, you'll have a friend in your class._

"Yeah, I'm really excited. But he's not my best friend." 

_No? Who's your best friend, then?_

Tony scoffed. "Pfft, you are, Steve, obviously. But I don't think I can take you to school with me. Your monitor is too bulky to fit in my bag with my notebooks and pencils and stuff. Sorry." 

_That's okay. I wasn't very good in school anyway._

"How old are you, anyway, Steve?" Tony wanted to know. His mother was calling him to come and have dinner, and he called back that he would be down in just a minute. 

_I'm 20._

Tony, who was all of thirteen years old, laughed. "You're super, super old, Steve. Practically ancient. But I have to go now, I'm going to have dinner with Mum and Dad, but I'll be back later, okay? And I'll tell you all about how tomorrow goes!" 

_Okay. Bye. Have fun. I'll talk to you tomorrow after school._

* * *

Tony waved goodbye to his mother, who stood by the gates of UNIS with a little sad smile on her face. She had insisted on riding with him and Jarvis (Howard was still asleep with a hangover) to school, even though school started promptly at 8 AM (Tony thought this was practically criminal, he didn't like waking up in single digit hours). Once his mother was out of sight, Tony looked down at the campus map he held in his hand and hurried to his first class in biology, hoping to get a seat next to Rhodey. 

Once he got in the classroom door, Rhodey smiled at him from the left of the classroom, where he was sitting next to a pretty blonde girl with black glasses and her hair all tied up in a bun. She smiled over at Tony, held out her hand as he walked over to sit on the other side of Rhodey. 

"Hello there. I'm Pepper Potts." 

Tony wanted to laugh. Pepper Potts was such a silly name. But she was kind of pretty, and Rhodey seemed to think she was okay, so Tony guessed he could let it slide. 

He would have said more to Rhodey, but at that moment their professor walked in and harrumphed, signaling the start of lecture. Tony looked over at Rhodey, couldn't catch his eye - his friend was too busy whispering to Pepper - and sighed, opened his notebook, and began to take notes. 

* * *

Rhodey wanted to sit with Pepper at lunch, too, and they laughed over grapefruit cups and crustless sandwiches, and Tony pouted, wishing Steve was there. He was a little cheered up when Rhodey turned back to him and asked him what clubs he was going to join - Tony wanted to join the robotics club, but he was also sort of iffy about joining the classic literature club that Rhodey wanted to join, the club's weekly meetings interfered with robotics programming sessions on Thursday afternoons. 

"What can be so interesting about boring old robots?" Pepper asked, laughing. Her tone wasn't malicious at all - she sounded rather clueless and airheaded about the whole thing - but Tony smarted a bit, and wished (not for the first time that day) that Steve could be there. 

* * *

 _How was your first day at school?_ Steve's monitor greeted him the moment he walked through his bedroom door and dropped his backpack on the floor by the desk. 

"Not very good," Tony muttered, flopping down on the bed and throwing his arm over his eyes. "There's this girl, her name is Pepper Potts. That's a really silly name, isn't it?" He rolled over onto his stomach to see the monitor feed. 

 _A girl? Do you like her?_ Steve wasn't one to mince around questions. Tony liked that about him. 

"No, definitely not," Tony said. "I think she's annoying. I don't like her one bit. I think Rhodey does, though. Maybe."

The green speckles on the monitor darted around playfully, and Tony could swear Steve was laughing at him. "Don't laugh at me," he pouted. 

_Sorry. It's just funny. You'll like her someday, probably. Maybe._

Tony wrinkled his nose. "Ew, no. Never. Never, ever ever." 

_If you say so._

 

 

 


	10. Finding the Right Person

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Please keep in mind that Steve is still mentally stuck in ~1940-ish, before he joined the war effort, before the Super-Serum transformation. Let the awakening begin.

His mother had told him to always be nice to girls, but Tony felt that in some cases exceptions had to be made. Pepper was one such exception. 

Tony found her absolutely irritating and annoying, with her high pitched voice and the way she tossed her hair carelessly over her shoulder and how she talked to Rhodey about classical literature and poets and managed to somehow divert the conversation whenever it turned to something that Tony might want to talk about. It wasn't even that Tony didn't like classical literature and poetry - he could quote at least a dozen of Shakespeare's sonnets, though he really wasn't sure what many of them meant. Maria had told him that a lot of them were about love, which Tony found absolutely horrifying, but his mother had only laughed and told him that one day he would appreciate them and his ability to quote Shakespeare at a lovely girl. 

And that was the other thing. Whenever he went over to Rhodey's house after school or on the weekends to work on school projects, the conversation would always some way, some how, turn to Pepper. Rhodey would always look out his bedroom window with dreamy eyes and talk about how lovely her hair was, how pretty her smile was, and because he and Rhodey were friends, Tony just nodded and said noncommittal "uh-huhs" and "yeahs" to indicate some semblance of paying attention. He didn't find Pepper attractive - in fact, he didn't find any girls attractive, not in the way that Rhodey seemed to. Once, while Rhodey was downstairs getting a cup of juice, Tony had dropped his pencil and it had rolled under Rhodey's bed; when he had wriggled underneath it to look for it, he found, amidst the dust bunnies and lonely socks, was a magazine with a naked girl on the front cover. Out of a sense of morbid curiosity, Tony had tentatively opened it, had flipped through a few pages, and had been only scientifically fascinated by the slick mounds of breasts and the curve of muscle underneath spread thighs, had no interest whatsoever in whatever might lie behind those silky scraps of fabric that the women called underwear. Tony thought it was all very confusing, and thought that if he were a girl, he would still much prefer wearing his boxers, thank you very much. At that moment, Tony heard Rhodey's footsteps on the creaking stairs, grabbed his pencil, and wriggled back out from under the bed. 

Seemingly over the month of August, Tony had shot up another six inches, and his mother had almost cried as she measured him at 5'7". 

"You're growing up so fast, my sweet baby boy," she had exclaimed, tears in her eyes as she wrapped him in a tight hug. Tony had been surprised to find that he could tuck his chin over his mother's head, was shocked to find thin strands of silver winding their way through Maria's dark hair. 

"Look at you!" she had said, standing back from him and smiling up at him, and Tony wondered when she'd become so small. "You're practically a man already. When did my sweet little baby boy get so big?" she wondered, looking up at him. 

Tony only shrugged noncommittally and didn't know how to tell his mother that her 'sweet little baby boy' had had to figure out how to use a razor on his cheeks and chin from how-to videos on the Internet, how he'd accidentally cut himself more than once. Didn't know how to point out to her that his voice was dropping, deepening, by the minute, the hour, the day, the planes of his cheekbones emerging sharp underneath his eyes. 

 _Your voice has gotten deeper,_ Steve observed one day while Tony was busy working on a report for his world history class. Oracle bones were incredibly fascinating, Tony thought to himself, and wondered how hard it was to learn Chinese. Surely his father couldn't object to that, could he? Chinese was a pretty useful language. 

"Yeah, Steve, I'm growing up," Tony said, laughing. He was surprised to hear himself, still expecting to hear the giggles of a little boy and instead hearing the deep laugh of a man. 

 _How tall are you now?_ Steve asked. 

"I'm 5'8" right now, but maybe I could grow a little bit more. I don't know." 

 _If you keep growing, you'll be bigger than me,_ Steve said, and Tony could swear there was a bit of teasing in there. 

"How tall are you, Steve?"

_I'm 6'2"._

"Oh, that's super, super tall," Tony said, scribbling down some notes on the Shang Dynasty. "That's taller than my dad."

_How is your dad, by the way? You don't talk about your parents much._

"I dunno," Tony said, chewing on the end of his pencil and staring at his computer screen. "We don't talk much. I don't want to talk to him." 

 _Why not?_ Steve asked. If Tony were really being honest with himself, Steve sounded concerned.

"He's too busy with work and stuff, and whenever he talks to me I feel like he doesn't listen to anything I have to say. He just wants me to do this, to do that, and he's always trying to get me to meet the daughters of some of his work friends, and he makes me dress up in these really tight, itchy suits just to take them ballroom dancing or eat cucumber sandwiches at the Four Seasons. I don't even like cucumber sandwiches, and I don't like the girls either."

 _I remember when I was growing up, I had a calendar of pin up girls at home,_ the screen read out.  _I hid it under my bed so my mother wouldn't see._

Tony wrinkled his nose at the screen, though Steve couldn't see it. "I saw something like that at Rhodey's house once. They don't make me feel anything," he confessed to Steve. "I don't know why. Maybe I haven't found the right kind of girl yet?" 

_Perhaps. I didn't find one, either._

* * *

After saying good night to his parents and telling Steve he would talk to him in the morning, Tony furtively opened a new window on his computer, typed 'pin up girls' into the search bar. He scanned over the presented images with disinterest, eyes roving over a vast selection of women with long, curvaceous legs and sultry, pouty lips slicked with lipstick. There must have been dozens, hundreds, thousands of pin up pictures, and he had a feeling that if he kept on scrolling, he still wouldn't find any girl that appealed to him. 

He leaned back in his desk chair, rubbing at his eyes with the heels of his hands and wondering what was wrong with him. 

More on a whim than any real curiosity, Tony cleared the search bar, typed 'pin up boys' into it. Just to see. 

He found his mouth drying as his eyes scanned rapidly over chiseled abs, strong jawlines, felt a stirring in his pyjama pants. Horrified, he hurriedly closed the window, cleared his search history, and stared at the soft glowing desktop of rolling fields, the images still dancing before his eyes. 

After what felt like forever, a little window from Steve popped up.

_I thought you were going to bed? Why are you still up? Don't you have school tomorrow?_

"Uh, yeah, yeah, I do," Tony said, swallowing thickly and shaking his head to clear it. It didn't help. "I was just finishing up something. Goodnight, Steve."

_Goodnight, Tony._

* * *

_Tony's growing up very quickly. It's exciting, and a bit sad at the same time. I remember when I was still his age - well, that was only a few years ago, but at any rate. If he keeps growing at the same pace, he'll be my height, or taller._

_One thing that sort of concerns me is how absent his father seems to be. Granted, his father does own like a multibillion dollar company or something of the sort, but I personally don't think there's any job in the world that should stop you from being a father. I used to think that joining the army and being a soldier was a job that could qualify for that exception, but now that I think about it, not even that should stop you from being a parent. But I mean, I don't know anything about running huge companies, or what Howard Stark is like at all._

_I haven't yet figured out who Howard Stark is, or why he sounds so familiar. He just doesn't sound like someone I like, but maybe that's because Tony's been complaining about him for years now._

_And has it been years? This whole concept of time, and consciousness, and life in general, is just confusing, and I prefer not to think about it. While Tony is at school, I usually talk to myself, thinking about penguins and how they look like miniature waiters in tuxedos. I really like penguins. They're very cute._

_Speaking of cute, we talked about pin up magazines and calendars today. Me and Tony, of course, not me and myself and the imaginary penguins. And I told Tony that I hadn't found the right person, but that was sort of a lie. I had found the right person, but he was the wrong gender and he would have been horrified if I'd told him I loved him desperately, unrequited, all-consuming. It would have destroyed us, I think, our friendship. But it was so hard not to like him; he was everything a young, asthmatic, underweight boy would want to be, he was tall, had a strong jaw, had a laugh and a strength that showed itself whenever he shook your hand or clapped you on the back for a job well done. It was hard not to be attracted to him, and I'm ashamed to say that it wasn't an innocent little crush on my part. It was full blown infatuation._

_But as years have gone by - and has it been years? Let's not talk about time - I've had a lot of time to think, and I've sort of determined that I wasn't really in love with Bucky. I was just in love with the idea of him, and the possibilities he presented. If you'd been in my position, you would have done the same._

_I wonder where he is now? The last time I saw him he was getting ready to leave for war. I hope he's safe, not lying in some unmarked grave somewhere. That would be frighteningly sad, and I don't think even little penguin waiters could comfort me._

_Speaking of lying, the pin up girls thing wasn't the only lie. I said I was 6'2", kept making jokes about how soon Tony would be taller than me. Why did I say that? I'm only 5'5"._

_Where did 6'2" come from?_

 

 


	11. Imagine

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written to: [Photobooth - Death Cab for Cutie](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4EFO6vD3es).
> 
> Enjoy.  
> Misaya

"I am really very concerned about Tony," Miss Shreve, Tony's World History teacher at UNIS, said to Maria and Howard one brisk November afternoon. She noted that Tony's father didn't really seem to be paying attention, and appeared to be looking dazedly over her shoulder out the window, where grey clouds were gathering on the horizon; they would get snow that night, Miss Shreve felt, and was supremely annoyed by this. She hated the snow, the grey slush that it turned into after only a few hours on the New York roads, how it would frost over on her car's windshield and make her pull out her winter parka and gloves from the closet so she wouldn't freeze to death on her drive to work. It annoyed Miss Shreve even more that Howard didn't seem to be at all involved in his son's progress. If she were being kind, she would say Howard Stark had come to the mandatory meeting a little bit tipsy, his breath sweet with the tang of liquor; if she were being honest, Howard Stark was drunk out of his mind, and Maria had had to support him walking through the door. 

"What about Tony?" Maria asked anxiously, worrying her hands in her lap. "Is there something wrong with his academic performance?" 

"It's not his performance, exactly," Miss Shreve said, turning back to Maria after shooting a disapproving glance at Howard; Howard seemed not to notice, and Miss Shreve wondered, not for the first time, how exactly this man of all people was the owner of one of the largest corporations in the world. "It's his attitude in class. He is often very inattentive, and usually doodles in his notebook when he is supposed to be taking notes. Additionally, he doesn't seem to get along well with others. His project partner, a young lady by the name of Pepper Potts, has often complained about him getting quickly irritated and snappy with her."

"In fact, besides young Mr. Rhodes and somebody named Steve, it does not appear that Tony has made any friends during his time here, which, as I'm sure you can understand, is rather concerning." 

Miss Shreve folded her hands and looked across at Maria and Howard. Howard was still staring distractedly out the window, his eyes bloodshot, and Maria was picking at a knot in her skirt. At the mention the name "Steve," Howard started, turned to her for the first time. 

"Steve?" Howard asked, his words slurred. Miss Shreve wrinkled her nose at the wave of alcohol fumes spilling across the table. 

"Yes, Steve," she said, forcing politeness. "I've absolutely no idea who the boy is, I don't have a Steven in any of my classes, but with the way Tony goes on about him, you would think this child was everywhere. I've asked his other teachers, and they also have no idea who this Steven is. His math teacher has even gone so far as to suggest that he's pretend! I, of course, said that was completely absurd. How could a thirteen-year-old boy still have an imaginary friend?" 

Miss Shreve fixed Maria with beady eyes; Howard was starting to look a little green and Miss Shreve wondered if he would at least have the decency to make it outside before he vomited all over the new marble floors.

Howard wasn't thinking about any of that. With a sudden, startling moment of clarity through his drunken haze, he remembered Steve Rogers, from decades and decades, another lifetime ago, wondered if, just maybe, this was who his son kept talking about. But the nanobots hadn't been broadcasting anything, he remembered that well enough. So how...? 

"And so," Miss Shreve was saying, "we would recommend some sort of psychiatric evaluation for Tony. You know, just to make sure that everything's shipshape up top."

"Right, yes, of course," Howard murmured absentmindedly, the first words he'd spoken since entering Miss Shreve's classroom. "I'll make sure of that." He stood up, clasped Maria's hand in his own, forced her up as well. "We'll just be going now so we can attend to this matter as quickly as possible," he said, clumsily fastening Maria's coat around her and stumbling towards the door. 

Miss Shreve watched the Starks exit her classroom with narrowed eyes, watched the staggering lean form of Howard Stark as he leaned on Maria and stumbled towards the parking lot. That most definitely wasn't the profile of a Time Magazine's Man of the Year. 

* * *

"Anthony," Howard said, his words coming in a blur. "Anthony, I need to talk with you." 

His son entered the living room, running a hand through a wild tangle of dark brown curls. Howard looked up at him from his position on the sofa - when had his son gotten so tall? when had his voice gotten so deep? - and gestured for him to take a seat. Instead of sitting down beside him, Tony planted himself in the armchair across from his father and looked at him. Howard swore it was like looking into a mirror, just aged a few decades back. But Tony's look, the expression in his eyes, that was all Maria's. That determination, that steady confidence that Howard felt leaking from him day by day. 

"Yes, Father?" Tony asked, his voice quiet. Deep. A man already, grown up while Howard looked the other way. "What did you need to see me for?" 

Howard cleared his throat, made himself steady, firmly put down the longing for a nice glass of whiskey. 

"I had a talk with one of your teachers this afternoon," Howard said, trying to ignore the pounding headache building behind his eyes. "She mentioned that you were friends with somebody named Steve?" 

"Yes?" Tony asked, suddenly cautious. Howard could see it in the tensing of his knuckles on the edges of the armrests. "What about it?" 

Howard felt nauseous. 

"Is this Steve...real?" 

"Of course he's real," Tony said. Indignant now. Howard could see that in himself, just like him when he was still young and reckless. "He's a real person."

"Anthony. This Steve...he can't possibly be the one in your room, right? In the monitor of green specks that's been in there ever since you were a child. That's the Steve you're talking about, isn't it?" 

Unguarded for a moment, Howard could see the uncertainty in Tony's eyes, the steeling of his resolve as he lied. "No. It's a Steve at school." 

Howard sighed, waved his hand and motioned for Tony to go away. He thought it might ruin his credibility more than it already was if he vomited in front of his son, and as Tony's footsteps tapped away down the hall, Howard sighed again, lay down, and waited for his dizziness to subside. 

* * *

A few days later, while Tony was at school, Howard quietly slipped into his son's room. He looked around, at the soft white curtains hanging still, framing the windows gently. He looked at the bookshelves full of comics and engineering texts, the tops dusty with disuse. Howard looked at the various electrical equipment used as decoration, the buckets of huge nuts and bolts and big plastic wrenches with colourful handles, just the right size for a growing baby boy to use. They'd never taken it out of the room, and Tony had never complained about it or taken any initiative to do anything about them. 

He let his eyes drift over to the giant monitor on the far wall of the bedroom, hanging above Tony's desk like some black and green abstract artwork. The green dots were still, like they had been the day he brought Tony home from the hospital, and surely that was a sign, wasn't it? That Steve wasn't, couldn't possibly be alive. 

He sat down at Tony's desk, rested his chin on a hand, and stared at the green specks, muttering to himself, to Steve if he was still there - the specks on the monitor remained stubbornly still - until he heard Tony and Maria come home. 

* * *

Miss Shreve and the other teachers were rather gentle, but rather firm about Tony's psychiatric evaluation. And Howard, too sick with worry about the company and the odd swelling in his abdomen that didn't seem to go down no matter what he did, ignored these incessant requests from Tony's teachers and tried to put the green speckled monitor out of his thoughts for good.

Tony's teachers frowned and chatted about him in the staff lounge during lunch and the breaks the students had in between classes. A favourite topic of gossip was how his psychological adjustment couldn't really be blamed on him; it was all the father's fault, Miss Shreve said over a salad and coffee. Coming in drunk to a mandatory meeting, can you imagine? Didn't even try to hide it.

Poor Maria, she said, her mouth full of lettuce. The poor woman.   

Maybe she drove him to drink, another teacher said slyly. I mean, with a face like that, I can't imagine anyone being less than perfect. 

Miss Shreve chewed on her salad thoughtfully, and decided privately that that most certainly couldn't be the case. Maria Stark looked too innocent, too timid, to drive anyone to anything. As for the boy, he was sharp, that was a sure thing. But he didn't talk to anyone, not really. He didn't take notes, he wasn't a good student. And it infuriated Miss Shreve - along with all the other teachers - that he still managed to get perfect or near perfect scores. 

But without parental consent, no psychiatric evaluation was to be had, and Tony ignored the disapproving glances his teachers gave him while he bent over his notebook and doodled what he imagined Steve would look like. And maybe it was because his name was Steve, maybe it was because Tony really liked him, that the drawings all turned out like the images of Captain America in comic books stuffed along his bookshelves, dusty with disuse. 

* * *

_Something very odd happened a few days ago. I didn't tell Tony about it, the poor boy seems to have a lot on his plate at the present moment, but someone besides him started talking to me. It was a man's voice, deeper, weary, his voice slurred like he'd had just a bit too much to drink._

_He introduced himself as Howard Stark. He asked me if I was Steve Rogers, if I would like to talk to him._

_Well, I am Steve Rogers, that is very true, but did I want to talk to him? Not at all._

_I don't know why I feel like this, but I just have the feeling that he's not a very good person, and from the way he treats Tony - with casual disregard and an affectation of disgust, at least from the way Tony describes him - he can't be a very good father either._

_So I kept very silent, not thinking anything at all, and I could hear his breathing, noisy and ragged. He waited for what felt like centuries, but must have been more like hours, before he finally stood up and went away._

_Tony came in a few minutes later, talking to me as soon as he got into his room, his words bubbling out rapid and steady, as if he'd been bottling them up all day so he could talk to me. Like he genuinely wanted to talk with me._

_I know it will sound a bit creepy to you, but it feels very nice to have this sort of attention again. To be the one someone tells everything to, from trivial day to day things to deep thoughts about the universe. Maybe this was what Bucky felt like? I've no idea. Bucky was always surrounded by girls, almost as if he was flaunting them for the world to see, confident in his own sexuality. Heterosexual. Capital H. No room for interpretation, no wiggle room at all. It made me feel strangled, just being around him._

_But with Tony, I feel...free. I've got ample room to breathe. That doesn't make sense, does it? But it's just what I feel._

_I never imagined I'd ever be able to feel this way._

 

 

 

 

 


	12. The More You Know

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please refer back to Chapter 6 regarding Steve's lack of knowledge about the Holocaust. 
> 
> Sorry for inaccuracies regarding Howard & Maria Stark, I'm not very familiar with Tony Stark's life story (and by not very familiar, I mean pretty much not at all). 
> 
> Annette is a complete OC. 
> 
> Written to: [Walls - Tiēsto ft. Quilla](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u94VpYq0RIw).
> 
> Enjoy.  
> Misaya

"Mum took me to see a tailor," Tony said to Steve, flopping onto his bed on a warm, breezy fall afternoon. The white gauze curtains framing his window billowed full and soft, and New York City glistened like diamonds below him. "Wouldn't it be funny if all tailors' names were Taylor? I think it might be." 

 _Why were you going to see a tailor?_ Steve asked, curiously. Tony's mention of the tailor brought back some disjointed memories, of a man with dark hair and a little goatee and a sharp copper-coloured vest holding a measuring tape against him. The tape was cool, and the man whistled to himself as he jotted down a few notes on a clipboard with a blue ballpoint pen. When Steve had craned his neck to look at the paper, he had seen it was filled with a huge list of numbers. He remembered swallowing awkwardly as the man got down on his knees, measuring across his hips with the tape, averting his eyes from that dark, piercing gaze that seemed to drill right into him. 

He remembered the same man presenting with a blue suit, fatigue and pride and hope written all over those sharp features. But it wasn't a suit, not the type you'd go dancing in, not the type that looked so delightful on Bucky's shoulders in shades of black and dark navy. What suit was it? Steve tried to think, but Tony was talking again and he lost his train of thought. He privately made a note to think about it some more, perhaps when Tony was sleeping or when he was at school.

"It's for homecoming," Tony explained, hopping off his bed and going over to his desk. "It's a dance to celebrate the start of the school year or something like that, although why anybody would want to celebrate that is beyond me. Mum said I should go, and Rhodey practically forced me to go. He convinced some girl in our history class to go with me, even though I didn't want to go, but Rhodey's my friend and he really wanted to go with Pepper." 

 _You're not friends with the girl Rhodey set you up with?_ Steve wanted to know, his words scrolling across the screen in lines of green. 

"Not really, no," Tony said, leaning back in his desk chair. "She's just some girl that I know. We're acquaintances at best, but I guess Rhodey heard that she really wanted to go and didn't have anybody to go with. I don't get it, though. She seemed super disappointed that I didn't do this big thing and ask her to the dance, like a lot of other guys did. I don't really get that. Shouldn't it be enough that I'm going with her, why should I have to do some big gesture also? Mum would never let me hear the end of it."

 _Ha,_ Steve said, and Tony smiled.  _That's just the way some people are. And some people aren't like that at all. She's just one of the people that like that sort of stuff, and you're just one of the people that don't like that at all._

"I guess," Tony said, scuffing his feet over the carpet. "What kind of person are you, Steve?" 

 _Hmmm..._ The dots continued over the screen, like Steve was really dedicating a lot of time to thinking about it. After a while, he replied,  _I don't really know. I don't think I've ever been put in a position like that. I guess it would have to depend on the person asking me/the person I'm asking. Lots of things depend on other people._

"Yeah, I suppose," Tony said, running his hands through his unruly dark curls. His mum had run her hand through them earlier that day, after they had left the tailor's place, and had told him with a little smile that he ought to get it cut. Tony had disagreed, shaking his head vigorously; Maria had laughed at the way his deep brown curls bounced around and fell over his forehead into his eyes. For the first time in what felt like forever, Maria seemed to be happy, and Tony couldn't help but feel that she would have been much happier if she'd never met Howard. But then that had called into question his own existence, and he didn't much like to think about not existing. He couldn't imagine what it would be like. 

"Oh, and guess what Steve?" Tony said, grinning as he caught sight of the letter on his desk again. It was stamped with a crimson crest, with the lettering 'Massachusetts Institute of Technology' written in the border of the circle. Without waiting for Steve to ask what it was Tony sounded so happy about, he continued. "MIT's offered me a position at their school, for electrical engineering. I guess there were some reps at the state robotics competition last year, and they really liked my designs, so they came up and talked to me and sent me an application form. I bet Rhodey's wishing he'd decided to participate in robotics club instead of some boring British literature club." 

Even as he said this, Tony felt a pang of regret. Rhodey and he hadn't been so close lately, drifting farther and farther apart. And Pepper certainly wasn't helping any of that, Tony thought, but he supposed it could help if he weren't so petty about things...

 _So you're going to go to university? That's fantastic!_ Steve's text looked genuinely excited and proud, and Tony grinned, pushing Pepper out of his mind. 

"Well, they said that since I'm still in high school, I can choose to finish that before I go there, but if I just want to go, I can...just go," Tony said, smiling. "I don't even need to graduate." 

 _Well, you've got time to think about it, I guess,_ Steve said.  _I'm sure whatever you decide will be great._

"Did you go to university?" Tony wanted to know. "Do you know what the people there are like?"

 _I never had a chance to go,_ Steve admitted.  _I never really had money for tuition fees, and my plans all involved going to the army. I wasn't really focused on school. But I think you'll do well there. You're a smart kid._

"I'm a man, now, Steve," Tony corrected, laughing. 

The screen just spit out a smile ":)" and Tony whistled to himself while he pulled out his backpack and started his homework. He had a paper due on the Holocaust in European History in a few weeks, and he still had a bunch of things to research for it.  

* * *

Maria smiled up at her son as she adjusted his deep blue tie for him, tightening the knot gently and smoothing out the creases in his shirt collar before stepping back to admire her work. Tony was getting to look more and more like Howard by the day. 

The Howard she once knew, Maria corrected herself. The Howard who wore suits every day, even on weekends, who had a mischievous quirk to his mouth and a witty retort behind every sentence. The Howard who was confident, self-assured, hard-working. Not the Howard she knew now, the one who sat in his office all day staring into a tumbler of amber whiskey and glancing furtively behind his shoulder every half-second. Not the paranoid, timid, frightened man she knew now, nor the angry, violent man she knew a few years ago. Maria wasn't sure which one she would rather have. 

"You look lovely, darling," Maria said, smiling at Tony. She smoothed back his unruly hair - she hadn't managed to convince him to get a haircut - and sighed in mock frustration when the curls insisted on spilling over onto his forehead anyway. "Goodness, your hair just doesn't want to stay put, does it?" she teased him. He shrugged, examining himself in the floor-length mirror. 

"Do I have to go?" he asked his mother, standing very still as she took a comb slicked with water and brushed his hair. "I mean, it probably won't be very fun." 

"You've already said you would go with her," Maria said, stepping back and examining him critically. It would do, she supposed. "And it really would not do if you broke your promise. You must act the gentleman, always, and nothing short of death or violent illness ought to stop you from a commitment. And besides, your father and I are going out tonight, and it's Jarvis's day off, so I really would feel better if you were with your friends instead of sitting here alone."

Tony sighed, rolled his eyes. And because she was his mother, and he could see the thin strands of grey woven through her dark hair, and because he knew she worried about him, he agreed. 

* * *

Her name was Annette, and her father owned an oil company or something like that, Tony thought, looking across at his date as he sipped at his second plastic cup of punch (was punch supposed to be this bitter?) and tried to ignore Rhodey and Pepper batting their eyes at each other only a few inches away. 

He'd done everything right, so far, he'd thought. He'd complimented Annette on her dress (a deep blue that matched his tie - Annette had insisted), on the way her curls fell over her shoulders, on how pretty she was. Annette probably knew that he wasn't being sincere, but she had smiled and graciously accepted his compliments all the same. Tony supposed that, objectively, she was a pretty girl, but he didn't feel any attraction whatsoever. She was missing something, but Tony had no idea what it could possibly be. 

Rhodey stood up, taking Pepper by the hand, and led her onto the dance floor. Annette looked after them dreamily, and deep inside him, Tony realised that he was supposed to ask her to dance, but he remained firmly in his seat, staring into his punch and adjusting his tie. He was starting to feel rather warm and flushed, and wondered if the air conditioning in the ballroom was broken or something of the like, or if it was because of all the students in here. 

Annette looked across at him with a flush creeping up her neck. Not breaking eye contact, she picked up her glass of punch and drained it - Tony watched the smooth line of her throat as she swallowed, thought it was...too smooth, if that were a thing - before reaching across the table, grabbing Tony's hand, and forcing him up. She stumbled on her way to the dance floor, and Tony, not for the first time, wondered why girls bothered to wear heels if they couldn't walk in them. He quickly revised this judgment as he stumbled over to the dance floor, and thought that it must be the level of the floor or something of the like, he certainly wasn't wearing heels. 

The room spun dizzily around him, the flashing disco lights overhead blurring into a rainbow of colours as Annette took his hands, placed one in hers, and the other on her waist. They circled around the room, and Annette was speaking to him, saying something, her face getting closer and closer but Tony couldn't hear her, not over the music that throbbed through him, couldn't see her past the flashing lights and the glimpses of Rhodey and Pepper locked in an embrace, Rhodey's back to him always, always, always...

Annette pressed her mouth to his, suddenly. To Tony, the lights stopped flashing, the people around him stopped dancing, the music became a slow, deep pulse in his chest. Suddenly, he was pushing her away, ignoring her hurt look, and the lights were flashing far too much, his head was pounding, everything was moving far too quickly - 

Somehow, Tony found himself outside the hotel, hugging his arms to his chest against the slightly chilly evening air. His face was wet, and his breath tasted like metal in his mouth.

He barely had the presence of mind to hail one of the cabbies waiting outside the hotel and tell him his address. He sank into the backseat of the car, smelling the leather and cigarettes embedded into the seats. It was familiar, it was soothing, and he breathed deeply and watched the flashing lights of the city around him.  

* * *

The apartment was silent - Jarvis was on his day off, and his parents had gone out to celebrate the opening of some new factory in Manhattan or something of the like, and most likely wouldn't be back until much later. 

Tony barged into his room, hurriedly unknotting his blue tie with one hand and tossing it to the side, running his other hand through his dark hair and mussing it up. He was crying, he wasn't sure why, but that had been his first kiss, and his mother had always told him to have your first kiss with somebody that you really, truly liked and cared about. He hadn't liked Annette, not like that, and he'd lost his first kiss and the room was spinning and it was still too hot...

He unbuttoned his starched white dress shirt, shrugged out of his, out of the dress slacks, and let the clothes puddle on the floor in an unorganised pile, leaving him in cotton boxers and a white undershirt. He pushed open the window, letting the cool night air against his skin. 

 _Back already?_ Steve asked, his monitor lighting up with the green text in the room's darkness.  _Is the dance over already? I thought these were supposed to go on for a long time._

"I didn't feel like dancing anymore," Tony muttered, trying to hold back tears as he sat down in front of his computer and tried to think about something, anything but the dance and Rhodey and Pepper and Annette and what he was going to do when he saw her again on Monday. 

There was a moment of stillness. _Don't cry,_ Steve said, and how he knew was beyond Tony's comprehension, but those words on the screen made the tears come faster and before Tony knew it he was crying and sobbing and telling Steve everything, from how the punch was bitter and his shoes were too tight and how she had kissed him and she didn't want him to - 

 _It's alright, shh, shh,_ and Steve was making those noises that he'd been making ever since Tony had met him, and it continued until Tony's breath came in short little hiccups and his eyes were red and raw and there were no more tears to be had. 

He was exhausted, but didn't feel like sleeping. Sirens wailed in the street beneath him, and Tony absentmindedly wondered where they were going, so many sirens, so frantically, as he opened a new browser window on his computer and began to research more facts about the Holocaust for his paper. The accounts from survivors were bonechilling, and Tony thought about how his father and what he might have done in World War II - Howard didn't really talk about that, not that he did much talking to Tony anymore. 

 _You should try to sleep,_ Steve told him, his box of green text interrupting Tony's typing.  _Crying always makes one tired._

"I'm not sleepy, not really," Tony said, but because he was glad Steve was worrying about him, he continued, "But I'll go to sleep in a bit, after I finish the outline for this paper."

 _What are you writing your paper on?_ Steve wanted to know.  _Lots of police tonight,_ he added, as more sirens wailed past. Tony hadn't been counting, but he felt sure that whatever had happened, it must have been something really bad. 

"I'm writing about the Holocaust," Tony explained, looking at the brochure for the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. "It's for my European History class." 

 _I can't imagine there's too much to write about a book burning,_ Steve said. 

Tony arched an eyebrow at the screen, even though he knew Steve couldn't see him. "Gee, where've you been?" he asked, jotting down some facts from the brochure. "It wasn't just a book burning. It was a lot more than that, everybody knows that." 

A long pause, like Steve was trying to process this.  _What do you mean?_ he asked cautiously. 

"Lots and lots of people died," Tony explained. "The Nazi Germans killed people that they didn't think were up to par with their visions for an ideal race."

 _I do suppose hundreds of thousands of people is quite a lot,_ Steve agreed, and Tony just scoffed. Rolled his eyes.

"No wonder school wasn't for you, Steve," he said, his words starting to slur together. Downstairs, the door banged open, and the noise drove itself into Tony's brain. "Not if you can't remember stuff like that. It wasn't just hundreds of thousands of people." 

There were footsteps racing up the stairs, and Tony was privately impressed that his father was able to run so fast in the state he was probably in. Howard usually came back drunk after outings like this, and the footsteps were far too heavy to be Maria's light tread. 

 _How many...?_ Steve's response was reluctant, as if he didn't want to know. 

"Eleven million people," Tony said, and very suddenly, he wished he hadn't said it. A scream howled through his room, a wordless shout so filled with pain and anger and terror that drilled into Tony's brain and made him press his hands against his eyes and plead with whatever gods existed for it to stop. Green text was filling his screen at a rapid rate, huge A's and H's and strings of gibberish punctuated with the number "11" over and over again. As if Steve couldn't believe it, though Tony thought it was common knowledge. 

Jarvis burst into his room, breathing heavily, to find Tony trying to find a way to turn his speakers off. He noticed the tear tracks on Tony's face, hurried over and cradled the young master in his arms, trying very hard not to cry himself.

"Oh, you poor boy, you poor boy," Jarvis kept repeating over and over, stroking his hand through Tony's dark curls. Tony's cheek was pressed up against the butler's starched shirt (did Jarvis ever dress in casual clothing, Tony wondered), and he vaguely wondered how Jarvis knew he was upset about Annette and the dance and the kiss. 

"How did you know?" Tony asked, pulling back from Jarvis's tight embrace and wondering why there were tears in his eyes. "About Annette?" 

"Annette? Who's that?" Jarvis asked. "Oh," he breathed, as he suddenly realised Tony had no idea what was going on. "Oh, young master, oh. Something terrible has happened. Your parents were in a car accident -" 

Tony stopped breathing, could barely think over the screaming, could barely hear Jarvis mention things like "killed instantly," "driving home," "two external casualties..." 

And then Jarvis was wrapping him in a tight embrace again, rocking him, and Tony suddenly realised that the screaming was coming from him. 

 

 

 


	13. Pennies and Salt

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "I buried Mum and Dad today." 
> 
> A chapter from Steve's POV, for once.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written to: [Wrapped in Piano Strings - Radical Face](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rW-CzPiU9tM).
> 
> Enjoy.  
> Misaya

_Eleven million people. That seems...just impossible. Eleven million? No, no, Tony must have been saying it wrong. But he wouldn't lie to me, he wouldn't lie about that kind of thing just to hurt me. At least, I don't think so._

_I...I just can't fathom that. How can eleven million people just, in the span of a few years, be dead? I couldn't even begin to know eleven million people in this lifetime. Not even if you counted the ones I'd know in the next life, or the one after that, or hundreds of thousands of lives after that. If you believe in reincarnation, that is. I don't know what I believe._

_I think I'm sort of forced to believe in it. I must be dead. There isn't any other logical explanation for it._

_I remember operating some kind of vehicle, one with lots of different levers and buttons and gadgets, but I didn't focus on anything, couldn't focus on anything because there was nothing rushing up at me. Nothing? That's not the right word to describe it. It wasn't nothing, but it wasn't something either. It was just...blackness, studded through with little specks of white that were ice. I've deduced that recently. It was ice. I'm at least eighty percent sure of that._

_Eighty percent because I remember being cold. It's not so much a memory as a feeling._

_But it could just be that Tony's not talking to me. He's lost his parents. I know how that feels, I remember when my mother died, not wanting to talk to anyone for ages, just wanting to sit in doorsteps and hallways and dark corners and hope that nobody would see and pay attention. That's when I took up drawing, I think, as a way to remind myself that I was still there, that I was still Steve Rogers. In retrospect, I wish I had taken it up sooner. I've all but forgotten the sound of my mother's voice, the way she would smile at me as Buck and I came running in after school. I can just barely remember the faded scent of cold cream and clean linen that always seemed to hang about her, the way she would bite at her lip as she hung up the washing in the front yard and prayed for it not to rain, how she would sit down in front of her vanity every morning and night and apply dabs of white lotion to her cheeks from a pale pink jar._

_Tony hasn't been talking to me, but I've heard some things. Scuffing. Banging. Papers rustling, doors slamming, sobbing into the quietness. I really do want to talk to him, maybe I could help him feel better. But would I know just what to say? Probably not._

_From conversations I've overheard in the recent past, this older man, Jarvis, has been tossing about words like "spring transfers" and "not pressing charges" and "driving under the influence." I don't know what this means. How this relates to the scuffling, and banging, and quiet crying when he thinks nobody is listening._

_I've been trying to talk to him, my words scrolling out mindlessly across the universe, but I guess he's not receiving them or he's not reading them. I'm not sure which one I'd prefer. Neither, really._

_And what are my words, really? Empty sentiments, letters across a surface._

_Don't cry._

_I care about you._

_It will be okay._

_I said that last one to someone once. Who was it? It was a woman, I think. Someone with bouncy dark curls and a brightly red smile. We were friends. I made a promise to her. The only reason I remember that is because I was talking to her as the nothing came towards me, and I told her it was going to be okay, even though I think she knew I was lying. My last words to her were a lie, and it's been bothering me ever since._

_"So, Steven," the priest would say to me on Friday afternoons as I climbed into the latticed confessional box at the Catholic church. "What have you got for me to hear today?"_

_I would sit there in that musty confessional box, my toes barely touching the floor, the dusty sunlight streaming in through the tiny holes in the wood. On the other side of the lattice was Father Joseph, though I could barely see him, and, for all I know, it could have been someone else. Another priest, another little boy like myself. My mother always confessed before me, stepping out of the box looking fresh and relieved and happy. I would always come out afterwards, not feeling particularly any different._

_"I've lied this week," I would more often than not say. The priest would tut, remind me of the Ninth Commandment: "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbours," and send me off with a penance of three or four Hail Marys._

_As I grew older, the confessional box seemed to squeeze in on me from all sides, the dusty air getting too hard to breathe, too hot to stand for more than a few moments. And I began to lie inside it as well._

_"Steven, is there anything else you would like to confess?" the priest would ask._

_I would trace the latticework, crumbling and dusty beneath my fingertips. I would think about my mother, waiting patiently outside and wondering what was taking me so long, what would I possibly have to confess, her patience turning to worry as the seconds ticked by. I would think about Bucky, the blossoming sprout of love inside me, and I would peek through the lattice at the priest, and tell him, "No."_

_I carried that love around with me, hopeful, blooming and flowering in the rays of his sunny smile, trodden by the girls he always seemed to have around. It was resilient, though, and always managed to worm its way back up to constrict at my heart, to bloom into the image of his face as I lay on my bed at night, the way his mouth would stretch around the sound of my name as I tried to ignore the heat in my face and stomach._

_After my mother died, the air inside the chapel became too stifling, the pews became a prison, and one Sunday, I woke up and realised with a slow smile that I was free. The chains of verses and the shackles of Hail Marys all fell away, and the love that I held hidden inside me blossomed and grew rampant without the suffocating air of the confessional box to hold it back._

_Excuse me a moment. I know you're excited to hear about my thrilling life story, and what little I can remember, but Tony is talking._

"Steve. Steve. Are you there?"  _His voice is thick, tired. Like he's all cried out._

"I'm here." 

_A silence. From both of us. Shock._

"You...you're talking."  _Disbelief. I can't quite bring myself to believe it either._

"I...I guess I am." 

_I guess my mouth, though I can't feel it at present, is moving in time with my thoughts. It tastes like pennies, like hot metal._

"Well...okay, I'll think about that later. But, Steve, I'm sorry."  _He's crying._ "I'm so sorry." 

"Don't be sorry. Don't cry. Please, Tony." 

_This only makes him sob harder, his sounds choked off as though he's biting down on his knuckles to keep himself from making noise. It hurts to listen to, and it tastes like pennies and salt._

"We don't have to talk about it. It'll be okay. I promise."  _And there I go again. Liar._

"Can you...can you just talk to me until I fall asleep?"  _he asked, and even though he's a young man, almost an adult now, his tone brings me back to his eight year old self. Crying and hiding under the covers while his father shouted and slammed doors._

"Of course we can. What would you like to talk about?"  _I asked._

"Something. Anything,"  _he pleads, and against the taste of hot metal and salt in my mouth, I tell him about the penguin waiters I think about and how silly they would be slipping across the ice and balancing trays of champagne._

_He listens, a little hesitant laugh slipping out as I told him about how they would accept sardines as tips, and my voice gets quieter and quieter as he hiccups once, twice, his breathing smoothing out deep and steady._

"Tony?"

_After a few moments, he speaks, his voice drowsy, his vowels blurred and stuck together._

"Who's going to love me?"  _he asked._ "I buried Mum and Dad today." 

_I was quiet for a few moments._

"I love you,"  _I said, the words unfamiliar on my tongue. They tasted sweet, hopeful, and, much to my surprise, perfectly natural. As if I had been waiting all this time to say it at exactly the right moment, but I had known it all along._

 _He laughed, tiredly._ "Thank you,"  _he said quietly._ "That means a lot to me." 

_I listened quietly, patiently, as his breathing smoothed out deep and even again, and hoped that he fell asleep with a smile on his face._

 


	14. Moving

Over the next few weeks, Tony packed his life away into shipping cartons and cardboard boxes to get ready for his spring transfer to MIT. The university had been more than pleased to hear that he would be attending so quickly; of course, they sent their congratulations and course catalogues mixed in with condolences for the untimely death of his parents. Tony read the sympathy card once, before tearing it up and tossing the pieces to the wind. 

He'd withdrawn from UNIS, much to the consternation of the robotics club. 

Rhodey had looked up at him as he came in to chemistry to announce that he was leaving the school, that he would be attending MIT at the start of January. Tony could feel his friend's gaze on his shoulder, but he didn't say anything, even as the teacher stood up and hugged him and whispered into his hair what a strong boy he was, how his parents would have been proud of him. As Tony left the classroom, he looked over. Rhodey and Pepper had a sheet of notes between them, and he was relatively sure they weren't notes about molecular orbitals, not from the way their toes were touching underneath the table. Rhodey had a pained look on his face, and Tony just rolled his eyes and walked out. 

He ran into Annette in the hall, coming back from using the bathroom. She flushed when she saw him - and maybe it was just because of the bad memories he had around her or because that was just how she looked - but it made her face look splotchy and something rather like an overripe tomato. She stammered over her words, "I - I'm so s-sorry about your pa-parents," and he just nodded once, curtly, before stepping around her to his locker. 

He cleared out his things, his notebooks, some of which hadn't even been written in once, his pens, a rainbow of reds and blues and blacks spilling out from the plastic jar he'd put on the top shelf just in case he ever needed one before a lab. The extra jacket that still hung in his locker, the one his mother had made him bring the very first day of high school just in case he lost his and it got too cold. Holding the red wool in his hands, he felt tears coming along again, and he scrubbed anxiously at his face, swallowing down hiccups and sobs just in case anybody was watching. 

Jarvis had been waiting outside for him, the car idling and sending puffs of steam into the air. He'd jumped out when Tony had run down the steps, his things bouncing haphazard in his hands, pens scattering all over the sidewalk. 

"Oh, Anthony," he'd said, gently hugging Tony and running his hands through his dark curls. "It's okay, it's alright, you're okay." Tony had cried into the starched lapels of Jarvis's dress shirt, had watched through blurry eyes as the stiff linen sagged under the assault of tears. 

"Don't call me Anthony," he'd sobbed into Jarvis's shirt. "My father called me that."

Jarvis had sighed, patted Tony's head, and had helped him into the car before climbing into the driver's seat again. 

* * *

Tony sorted through his childhood belongings, packing away memories of a happier time with a frown on his face. Though Jarvis had assured him that he would see to it that the apartment was kept clean and neat for the master's return, during spring breaks and summer vacations, he still wanted to get rid of some of the clutter he'd accumulated over the years, clutter that still hurt to look at, that still rent gaping holes in his chest every time he thought he had gotten over it. 

An old pinwheel from the New York County Fair. He remembered his father hoisting him up in the air, laughing as carnival music played all around them and Tony stuffed pink cotton candy into his mouth. He wondered if he was remembering this correctly, hoped that he was. 

A macaroni necklace from the third grade Art Appreciation class that he'd made for his mother. He'd never given it to her because it had been Maria and Howard's anniversary that weekend, and she came home with a necklace of rubies, and Tony had kicked the macaroni necklace into a bin and sulked for the rest of the night. 

A silver framed photograph of him and his mother, only a few months ago as he was getting fit for his first suit. He smiled sadly as he traced the fine threads of silver in her hair, as he admired the beginnings of crow's feet at the corners of her eyes. She looked happy, and he pressed a kiss to the wrought iron frame and placed it carefully in the box of things he was going to take to MIT. He didn't have any pictures with his father from recent memory, and he preferred to keep it that way. 

From the records that the police had talked to Jarvis about, sitting in the dining room with documents and manila folders spread out along the cherry wood table, tapping at photographs and talking in hushed voices that stopped whenever Tony walked into the room. But he still overheard things, like the fact that his father had been behind the wheel, that the blood samples they'd taken postmortem had contained a rather high alcohol level. The children of the two people he had hit in his skid out of control, an elderly couple who had been driving home after visiting some friends in Queens, had decided not to press charges, saying they didn't want to put Tony through more pain, not with what he was going through with the death of his parents. If it was any comfort to the boy, a police officer had said while Tony was listening in around the corner, his parents had died instantly. No pain. 

And then there was the matter of Stark Industries. Who was going to take over it? Surely such an important, multimillion-dollar, international empire shouldn't be in the hands of a fifteen-year-old who wasn't even going to be in New York to oversee affairs at the domestic headquarters. As such, the vice president of the company, a man by the name of Mr. Williams who particularly enjoyed his prune juice, had been appointed chair of the company until such a time as Tony was old enough and able to take over the company. Tony would be kept up to date with the status of the company per weekly reports, in language that a fifteen-year-old would be able to understand, which would be sent to his mailing address while he was at university. 

In other words, everything was sorted out, and he was all ready to leave. As he was beginning to yawn and stretch out on his bed, he flipped through a few of his old Captain America comics, the only nod to his childhood that his father had ever shown. He smiled as Cap punched Hitler straight in the nose, laughed at the silly lettered sound effects, fascinated as he was with the adventures of Private Steve Rogers and Mascot Bucky. 

With a smile on his face, the first genuine one since his parents' death, Tony flopped down into bed, pulled up the covers, and went to sleep. 

 


	15. Her Perfume

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this has gone so long without an update. I've travelled to a different country recently to take classes, and I've been adjusting slowly. 
> 
> Written to: [Sometime Around Midnight - The Airborne Toxic Event.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m53cWa-CdUg)
> 
> enjoy.  
> Misaya

The residential board at MIT had settled Tony in a single at Burton Conner, a grand multistoried brick building with beautiful white arches and columns framing the main entrance. Tony's room had lovely lighting from the window at the corner, a beautiful New England light smattered with the first rosy hints of autumn shining over his desk, where he set up Steve, a desk lamp, and a perfectly round fishbowl containing a blue betta fish, which he'd called Parker.

His floor advisor had explained to him on the first day that the residential board had conferred, and after a series of several meetings, had determined that the 15, almost 16-year-old, might feel more comfortable in a single; this arrangement wasn't permanent, he'd been quick to assure Tony, if he decided halfway through the year that he had found a classmate he might want to live with, he was more than welcome to move into a double. And of course, there were always the floor dinners through which Tony could meet other people living on his floor, if he wanted. The residential advisor was quick to explain that Tony, despite his young age, was more than welcome to participate in all the activities MIT had to offer. 

His floor advisor, a junior in biomedical engineering who went by the name of Morgan, gave him a tour of the campus. Morgan's clear, confident Boston accent outlined the campus for Tony, the brick buildings taking on names and meanings, sketching the beginnings of a new home and a new life. On their tour, Morgan greeted several other students with a wave and a nod and a smile, and Tony felt the first springs of hope begin to well up inside him, that maybe he'd find someplace to belong in, some place to forget. 

"This is one of the dining halls," Morgan explained, pausing by a squat brick and glass building, just a few hundred feet from Burton Conner. "So you'll probably be eating here most of the time. I mean, unless you can cook," he hastily went on. "It's just that, I was your age not too long ago, and I don't think I could have made much more than instant noodles or a peanut butter and jelly sandwich," he said, with a modest laugh. "To be fair, I can make a mean PB&J, if you're interested." 

Tony smiled, and told Morgan that he would definitely have to take him up on that offer. Not even 16, he had started to take on a certain air of quiet confidence and dignity that would be helpful in someday taking over Stark Industries. 

"And of course, there's some rules we've just got to get over with," Morgan continued as he stepped inside the elevator, its walls mirrored and polished to a bright sheen, the floors a brassy tile, the buttons an off-white colour with light up numbers. "You know, for the floor and in general." Tony nodded as the brass elevator doors closed and the elevator began its smooth ascent. Morgan began to tick off the rules on his fingers. 

"No drinking, no drugs, etc. etc, you know, the usual," he began. "At Burton Conner, we expect you to be courteous about your dorm activities, so quiet hours begin at 10 PM during the regular semester, and begin at 8 PM during examination weeks. Of course, if you find that other people are being extraordinarily loud, feel free to file a noise complaint or go to one of the libraries on campus or one of the study rooms on the third floor." Tony's room was on the 5th floor. "Let's see...no pets, except a fish, which I think you have, I remember you carrying it in." 

"Try to keep your room clean, or at the very least, habitable," Morgan continued as the elevator doors slid smoothly open and disgorged them onto the soft carpet of the 5th floor. "It wouldn't do to have bugs in your room, very nasty things, you know," he said as they walked along the hall, their footfalls soft in the thick carpet. "No unmentioned guests, of the opposite sex or otherwise, in your room without a guest pass, although to be fair, I'm pretty lenient about that. So if you want to have a friend from school over or something, feel free to do so, just be aware that they have to abide by all the above rules and such." 

They stopped in front of Tony's door, and Tony fumbled in his pocket for the smooth metal keychain that he'd affixed his dorm key to. 

He pushed open the smooth cherry wood door, taking a deep breath as he stepped over the threshold, the dusty, academic air affixing itself deep in his lungs with a permanence that spoke of new homes and unopened scrapbooks and photographs swinging in the clothesline over chemical baths, waiting to be developed. Morgan stepped over the threshold with him, looking around the room, at Tony's small collection of personal possessions. 

"You read comics?" he asked, his eyes drawn to the small collection of Captain America paperback volumes Tony had yet to shelve. "Only Captain America, I see. I was always more of a Batman fan," he said, picking up a book at random and turning the pages carefully. "Didn't your dad work with him?" 

Tony muttered an affirmative, but Morgan either didn't hear, or just brushed it off as he put the book down and went to the side of the room to check on the status of Tony's thermostat. 

"What's your degree in, again?" Morgan asked, going over and reaching up on tiptoes to check at the vents of Tony's air conditioning and heater. His cream-coloured, cable-knit Fair Island sweater rode up a bit as he reached overhead to press a hand against the vents, the other hand fiddling with the dials of the thermostat. "You're going to be needing the heat," Morgan told him, looking back over his shoulder, and Tony swallowed, dragging his eyes reluctantly away from the strip of pale golden flesh Morgan's treacherous sweater had revealed. "Winters get bitingly cold, but I'm sure you already knew that, being from New York and all. I've never been, but I imagine it must be quite nice." 

"Um," Tony licked his lips, cleared his throat quietly. "I want to get a degree in electrical engineering," Tony said, as the pipes clanked softly and a dim heat began to seep into the room. Morgan lowered himself back to his normal height, and tugged his sweater down, turning back to Tony with a boyish smile on his face. 

"Electrical engineering, huh?" Morgan asked. "Sounds interesting, I suppose. Heaven knows it's going to be damned useful in the near future. And what with Stark Industries and all," Morgan continued, going over to sit by Tony on his bed, made up with some spare sheets Jarvis had managed to rustle out of a back closet somewhere in the apartment, "I'm sure that degree's going to be fantastic what with the work you'll be doing in the future. I mean, if you do want to take over the company in the future. I guess you could sell it, if you wanted to. I was really sorry to hear about your parents." 

Morgan's hand was hot and heavy on Tony's shoulder, and he tried to ignore the strength in his fingers, the warmth of his palm through Tony's light sweater. Tony swallowed, concentrated on Parker swimming around and around in his fishbowl, the afternoon sunlight twinkling off the glass. Morgan wasn't bad-looking, tall and blonde and athletic, with a twinkle in his blue eyes that crinkled in the corners whenever he smiled and displayed dazzling rows of white teeth. Tony vaguely found himself staring at the curve of Morgan's mouth, wondering, what if, what if - 

Morgan patted him on the back consolingly, jolting him out of his thoughts. "At any rate, I remember when I first came here, I was pretty out of it too," he said, getting up, the bedsprings creaking as the weight lifted from the mattress. "I'm a young one, like you. Not quite as young, but I'll be turning 19 in about a week. We'll have a floor party, with cake and pizza and everything. You eat those, right, no gluten allergies or whatever?" he asked, already heading toward the door and towards more pressing social obligations. 

Tony nodded, but by that time, Morgan was already around the door, and with a little smile and wave and a "Good luck!", had popped out of sight. 

* * *

The first week of Tony's classes passed surprisingly quickly, and Tony, loaded down with syllabi and packages of graph and college-ruled paper, scurried from his dorm to his classes to the dining hall and for once was able to crawl into bed and fall into blessedly black sleep. His dreams were about class, about equations and formulas that tasted saccharine sweet and crisp in his mouth, and for a short few hours, he was able to forget that his parents, that his mother, really, was dead. 

But there would be quiet, stolen moments throughout the day, when something, seemingly out of nowhere, would remind him of Maria. 

Three leftover Honey Nut Cheerios floating in a small puddle of milk in his breakfast cereal, the morning of...the accident. He had been in one of his silly moods, had told Maria that he would only eat a number of Cheerios that was a perfect square (172 was not, he said stubbornly, a perfect square, and so these three would just have to be forgotten). Maria had laughed and had leaned over to eat the Cheerios, fingertips wet with milk as she'd pinched Tony's cheek and told him that he was being too silly and smart for her tastes. 

Word problems in his differential equations and optimisation calculus textbook. "Maria wants to design the best layout for a cafe..." would have him holding his breath, biting at the inside of his cheek and trying to solve the problem, the numbers bitter and glutinous in his head as he tried to figure out the solution as fast as possible so he could move on to the next question. 

The smell of the winter air, bitingly crisp and cold, when he woke up in the mornings to the shrill brrrr-ing of an alarm clock, when he would rise from the jellied fog of sleep, smiling and thinking that his mother would walk into the door at any minute to tell him it was time to get ready for school. Mornings were the best and the worst times. The best in that, upon waking, he could forget, could easily pretend that he was still dreaming and that the accident had just been some horrible story he'd read about on the news to some other unfortunate family. The worst was when he couldn't pretend any longer and the wintry air crept under his covers and drove sleep from his head, when he realised that his mother wasn't really going to walk through the door, that this dorm, this small lavishly furnished cell was his reality. 

He hid his tears in his notebooks, little circular splotches that made the ink and graphite run and smudge. Nobody asked to see them, and Tony didn't show them to anyone. 

* * *

Though Morgan had explicitly said that alcohol would not be tolerated in the dorms, and certainly not for underaged people (Tony sincerely doubted most of the people crowded into Morgan's suite were legally able to drink), the night of Morgan's 19th birthday celebration saw dozens of brown bottles and handles of all colours of liquors arrayed on Morgan's coffee table. 

The instant Tony had sidled in, hesitantly, a bottle had been pressed into his hand, and Morgan, whose face was already red and creased in merriment, urged him to drink. 

"Might as well get it over with now," Morgan said, his words already blurred and slurred with alcohol, his breath laden with whiskey vapours. "It's a part of any bona fide college experience, and besides, it's pretty early in the semester, so it won't affect your grades or anything."

Tony took a swallow, forcing his face to remain placid as the bitter drink slid down his throat. Morgan smiled and clapped him on the back, telling him that there was more in the kitchen and to help himself if he so chose. Morgan walked away to greet some other floor members, and Tony put down the brown bottle, allowing his nose to wrinkle in distaste, and set the little wrapped Batman volume he'd bought for Morgan on one of Morgan's bookshelves, crammed to the brink with biomedical books and calculus texts and everything an engineering student could possibly need. One shelf was dedicated just to photographs, and Tony absentmindedly reached out and traced the wrought iron scrollwork of the silver frames: Morgan and an older woman, who must have been his mother; Morgan at his high school graduation, dressed in black robes, a red tassel hanging from his cap as he delivered a speech; Morgan and a girl wearing an MIT sweater. Morgan's arms were wrapped around her, and her eyes were turned towards him, up and to the left in blatant admiration as Morgan pressed a kiss to her cheek. 

A sudden wave of nausea swept over Tony, a clenching fist in the pit of his stomach, and while Morgan's back was turned and everyone's attention was directed into their own private conversations, Tony quietly slid out of the room and back to his own dorm. 

* * *

"Steve," he said, reaching out from where he lay face-down on his bed and groping blindly for the mouse, stirring the computer from sleep. "Steve. Talk to me." 

Steve's voice, when it came, was clearer and stronger than Tony ever remembered it being, and he leaned over, balancing himself precariously on the desk as he turned down the speakers and admonished Steve not to talk so loud. 

"Sorry about that, Tony," Steve said, his voice hushed now, but it still had that same strong quality about it. Tony wondered what exactly had changed. "How is school?" 

"It's good. I'm -" Here, Tony paused, wondering what to tell Steve. He decided to go with a default response. "I'm fine."

There was a pause. A heartbeat skip. 

"You don't have to lie to me," Steve said, a bit hurt, and Tony frowned. How had Steve been able to tell? 

"I can hear it in your voice," Steve added. "You can trust me, you know that, don't you, Tony?" 

Tony swallowed. "Yeah, I do," he muttered. "It's just, I don't want to talk about it. I kind of just want to go to sleep. Talk to me until I fall asleep, won't you?"

A raucous cheer rose up from Morgan's apartment, and Tony could hear it, even as far down the hall as his own dorm was situated. 

"What was that?" Steve wanted to know. "Is there a party?" 

"Something like that," Tony mumbled, wanting to steer the conversation as far from this topic as possible. "Don't worry about it. I popped in for a little bit, wasn't my kind of thing." 

Another pause, during which Steve sighed, cleared his throat, and began to tell Tony about a girl with chestnut-brown hair and cherry red lips, her name was "Penelope...no, wait, that wasn't it, Polly, maybe? No, that's not it, either..." and Tony finally groaned, told Steve he was going to sleep, and rolled over, clutching a pillow to his chest and trying not to cry.

* * *

_Tony's already sleeping. Well, he told me he was sleeping, but I can still hear his breath, hitching and hushed, like he's crying and doesn't want me to hear. I can hear his gulps for breath, just slightly louder than the dim shouts of the party. I'm sure he's going through a lot, what with his parents and adjusting to a new school and a new way of life, so this sort of thing is completely understandable._

_But what was her name? P-something. I met her through the war, the war brought us together even when it was dragging so many people apart. She had on a smart brown uniform, nipped in at her perfect hourglass waist, her dark hair spilling over the lapels in waves and curls, tucked in at the top with a neat little beret. Her lipstick never flaked at the corners, not even when she smiled, and it was almost as though her lips really were that colour...I can't tell you if that's true or not, I never saw her mouth without that shade of crimson on it.  
_

_I remember her perfume, something like vanilla and a deeper, muskier undertone to it. I remember how her dark hair curled over my pillow, the wavering flickers of her eyelashes as she woke up and smiled at me. The pinching feeling of guilt and shame as I looked at her, her bare skin pearlescent in the early morning light, and thought about how this was all wrong.  
_

_Paige. Patricia. Pamela. Patsy. Paulina. Penny.  
_

_..._

_Peggy._

 

 

 

 

 


	16. Strings

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It is about 1996/1997. I do not profess to be an expert on string theory, or, in fact, really understand/know what it is...
> 
> Written to: [Up, Ship! - Port Blue](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jozz7RmLpq0).
> 
> enjoy.  
> Misaya

Tony's first semester whirled by in a flurry of papers and exams and pages upon pages of notes in Tony's cramped, elongated slant. He passed Morgan in the halls a few times, and the older boy made no mention of his birthday party or the gift Tony had set upon his bookshelf. Tony let this pass without comment, and lost himself in the world of circuits and joules and the hard, impersonal comfort of numbers. His grades were excellent, his marks amazing, and his teachers shot smiles at him when they thought he wasn't looking. And it wasn't enough, it still wasn't enough. 

And yeah, Tony had Steve to talk to every night in between solitary bites of toast or lonely bowls of cereal, maybe sometimes a sandwich wrapped in wax paper and napkins that he'd managed to sneak out of the dining hall. And Steve was good company, to be sure, (and, really, where else did Steve have to go? Tony wondered. It didn't seem like the man was making any progress through time, but that concept didn't make sense, not at all, not even to Tony, who was an avid Doctor Who fan and was fascinated by the concept of time travelling), but every time they talked, every time Tony jiggled the mouse and watched his computer screen light up, every time he licked his lips and prepared to talk to Steve, there was a funny feeling in the pit of his stomach that Tony tried to quash to no avail. 

A feeling like tingling and tickling and nervousness whenever Steve would laugh at something he said, a sort of heat pricking up and suffusing through Tony's body, an itchy warmth that had him wanting to crawl out of his own skin and simultaneously hug himself tighter, wrapping his limbs in a little ball in his desk chair and lacing his fingers in front of his crossed ankles, feeling lonely and empty and wishing the arms were someone else's. Tony didn't tell Steve about this - good God, what would Steve think? - but more than a few times, hearing Steve's casual confidence rich in his deep, strong voice, every syllable practically drenched in it, Tony found his hands wandering, over his clothes, over his skin, dipping into waistbands and brushing aside zippers, wondering what if, what if? 

More often than not, he would pinch himself - hard - on the thigh, and tell himself to stop being silly and get back to work. Those quantum mechanics problems weren't going to solve themselves, were they? Of course not. 

And lately, something else had been bothering him as well. Steve had mentioned a Peggy once, just in passing, saying casually that he'd finally figured out that woman's name before going on to other, more relatable topics. 

"Peggy Carter," Steve had said, his voice laced with nostalgia, and Tony had swallowed roughly, his mouth suddenly dry. "I remember her. A sweet girl who always wore that sharp brown uniform and always had lipstick on. A real smart cookie, that one." 

And Peggy Carter surely couldn't be the same Ms. Carter that used to give Tony butterscotch candies whenever his code would run correctly? Surely, it couldn't be. There was no way Steve could be talking about the same one. Ms. Carter was smart, she was, and Tony supposed she did have a penchant for always wearing lipstick, but there wasn't any way that his Ms. Carter and Steve's Peggy could be one and the same. There must have been hundreds of Peggy Carters in the U.S., and probably at least a dozen in New York alone. 

But what if? That niggling thought had burrowed into Tony's brain and had taken up residence at the base of his spine, making it hard for him to sleep, making him toss and turn, his window open in the cool April night breeze. If that Peggy and Ms. Carter were the same person, that would make his Steve (his?) Steve Rogers. Wouldn't it? He vaguely remembered a Peggy Carter in the Captain America comics gathering dust on the bottom level of his bookshelf, an intelligent woman in a brown uniform who was instrumental to the war effort, a woman who'd worked closely with his father and with the Captain himself. 

Tony had found himself reaching out for the books more than a few times, before firmly grabbing his wrist and stopping himself. He wasn't sure what it would accomplish to look, and by the same token, wasn't sure if he wanted a confirmation or a denial. 

* * *

Tony brought Steve home for the summer, leaving the rest of his belongings neat and tidied in his single. Jarvis showed up promptly after Tony's last final, greeting him with hugs and a paper sack full of still-warm homemade chocolate oatmeal cookies, congratulating the young master in between bouts of asking him how his classes were going, had he made any friends, did he still like macaroni and cheese? 

His classes were fine, he had a few friends (a lie, really, but Jarvis didn't have to know that), and would the macaroni and cheese be out of the box? (Of course it would be, Jarvis assured him, and Tony said that he was looking forward to that very much.) 

As the miles melted away beneath their tires and the car crossed the state border into New York, Tony found his mind drifting to his parents, to their graves, how pretty the cemetery must be in the summer, no snow to encase the ground in a bitingly cold crust and dust the headstones with white silence. He heard Jarvis distantly asking him if he wouldn't like to go visit them, Jarvis had been taking care of their graves and no rampant weeds were growing up all over the place, he'd even managed to convince some pink roses to trail over his mother's headstone, just the kind she liked, and Tony was grateful for this, really he was, but he wasn't sure if he was ready. 

Maria Stark, beloved mother and wife. Sorely missed.

Mother and wife? Surely there must have been other words to describe her, surely that headstone in its granite finality wasn't nearly enough to describe the person she had been. And sorely wasn't a good enough adjective. Not nearly good enough. 

A cool hand on his forehead when he had a fever, drinking orange juice mixed from concentrate, eating chicken soup without the chicken because he didn't like the gummy texture it had in the soup. A kiss on his forehead before he went to bed, even if he was a teenager and that stuff wasn't cool. Laughing as she watched him building skyscrapers in the park's sandbox, her eyes covered with wraparound sunglasses to make sure you couldn't see if she had been crying or not. Tony felt a wrench in his gut at the last thought, and turned his gaze outside the window to watch the familiar buildings of his life flash by in a glimmer of steel and glass.

* * *

Jarvis sat down with him and Mr. Williams, VP of Stark Industries, to review the company's figures. As Mr. Williams coughed and pointed out the rising red line across the charts that indicated Stark Industries' net worth, relative yearly income, and relative stock value, Tony found himself tuning out the man, letting the numbers and zeros engulf him in a musty silence that wore the cape of dust motes dancing in the afternoon sunlight that filtered through the penthouse apartment's windows. The figures reminded him of his father, sharp and angular and factual without give. 

Words droned around him. Missiles. Tanks. Artillery. 

I thought we were supposed to be protecting people, he wanted to say. I thought we were supposed to save lives, not look for different ways to end them. 

Mr. Williams eventually ground to a stop, placed a liver-spotted hand on Tony's, and asked him if he had any questions, if he had any suggestions he wanted to look into. He said that there wasn't anything at the present time that he felt concerned with, and his chair scraped against the hardwood floor as he stood up to go. 

* * *

The last month of summer eventually came around, golden and already crisp with the promise of fall, and Tony was entertaining himself with books upon books about string theory. 

"Things in nature are not comprised of mere points. Instead, if one is to fully understand the complexity of natural beings, it may be better to picture their composition as millions of tiny, indivisible yet individual, strings, operating on different wavelengths." 

Tony found the theory fascinating, and spent hours on hours debating it with Steve, who didn't fully understand the subject, but was willing to listen to Tony gab on about it. 

Tony was grateful for Steve's sincerity, and gladly welcomed his company, even if it did make butterflies dance in his stomach and a flush to creep up his skin. 

* * *

_Tony's been talking to me about string theory, which, supposedly, is the idea that all living things (or, things from nature, as he called it) are made of strings. Not just single atoms._

_Whatever that means._

_I suppose the concept is interesting, to say the least, that everybody is actually made up of thousands of tiny strings, that the whole world is connected through knots and loops of thread that exist on a separate plane. That people's lives are intertwined because a few knots manage to string them together at a few indeterminable points in time before they spin apart again.  
_

_Did Bucky see that? I've often wondered. Did he see me reaching out for him as he fell from that train, could there be strings reaching from my grasp to his to spin us back together again? Did they exist? Or have all his connections just been cut off already? Do I have a loose set of strings with no ends, spinning out into the universe and reaching, searching for other loose ends to tie to for completion?  
_

_Maybe it is, maybe it's not. But for what it's worth, I feel like Tony and I have been getting closer since his parents died. That sounds like a horrible thing to say, I realise, but it is the truth.  
_

_Maybe it takes a loss to open up your loom for other connections.  
_

_Tony's asleep now, and it would be rude of me to wake him up to ask him to read me his old elementary school history textbooks. He just got past World War I, but I know there's got to be a lot more. Decades, maybe even centuries, although I was under the impression that centuries later a flying automobile would already have been invented, but maybe that's just wistful thinking.  
_

_I remember seeing one, at an exposition with Howard Stark. Bits and pieces of my life have been floating back to me seemingly out of nowhere, and I remember him presenting a chrome shiny car that levitated a few inches above the ground before falling back with a crash, his embarrassed, casual laughter saying that that definitely wasn't supposed to happen, and that he'd be looking into it, it was only a prototype, after all! I remember looking at Bucky's back and glaring at the girls who hung onto his arms, begging him silently, willing him to look back. He didn't.  
_

_I remember something else. A man with glasses and a fatherly smile, telling me that just maybe he could pull some strings, get me into the war after all, as he stamped an A on my file. An A for my clearly 4-F body.  
_

_There are the strings again, connecting you and me and everybody.  
_

_Tony says that the strings never really go away, even if somebody dies, their strings just get redistributed into the universe in some way, shape or form.  
_

_That got me thinking, about those eleven million people. That number still sickens me, and I can't say it out loud. Where did their strings go? Are they all here, in you, in me, in the lives of children and generations yet to come? Or are they all floating somewhere in the ether, tied and knotted in tragedy and fear, all clumped up together as if to demarcate this event from the rest of history?  
_

_I've no idea, and for the first time, I've been glad I wasn't available to experience that, to know about it firsthand._

_Poor Howard. Carrying that knowledge around must certainly have unhinged him in some ways, those strings reaching out and tugging at him and telling him that yes, 11,000,000 people were once alive and now aren't, and do you understand, can you understand that, at one time you and these 11,000,000 people existed, and all of a sudden, it was just you?_

_It's far too late to ask him, and I know it'll be hard for Tony, but I feel like I ought to tell him that perhaps the father he knew and the man he once was weren't the same person, not really. How could they be, knowing what I've just told you? It seems insanely improbable.  
_

_I've managed to see. Or, at the very least, I've managed to wrench open my eyes. I've seen cracks and fissures above me, and little bubbles, sometimes light blue, mostly black. It's very boring to look at, but it is something.  
_

_I've got a bad feeling about it, though, as odd as that sounds. I've got a lump in the pit of my stomach. Something bad is going to happen, and someone, somewhere, is going to need me very soon. I don't know why I feel that way. I just do._

_Please, God, if you exist, don't let it be Tony. Don't do anything bad to that poor boy anymore. I'm begging you._

_Please._

 

 

 

 


	17. Safety in Numbers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It is 1998. Tony is a sophomore, at the beginning of the spring semester at MIT.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written to: [Emotional Anorexic - Svavar Knútur](http://www.infinitelooper.com/?v=9CyquKxA7ZM).
> 
> Enjoy.  
> Misaya

"So you want to add a major? Am I understanding you correctly?" 

His advisor sounded disbelieving, looking over her half-moon spectacles at Tony, who'd just turned sixteen. Steve had sung him an incredibly off-tune version of Happy Birthday and he'd laughed and ate two cupcakes, because Steve couldn't have one, because Tony hadn't yet invented some sort of device to send a cupcake over the airwaves. He fully intended to. 

"Yes, that's right," Tony said, leveling his gaze at her. "I want to add physics as a major. Most of my classes should already be applicable towards its degree requirements." 

The woman frowned as she tapped away at her keyboard, checking over his transcript - perfect - and any prerequisites that might be needed - there were none. Tony had checked and rechecked several times over. 

"Are you sure the workload won't be too stressful for you?" she wanted to know, and Tony wanted to laugh, wanted to ask her if she'd ever heard the term of safety in numbers, wondered if she had ever felt that way. "Adding physics to electrical engineering, quite frankly, is hell. Pardon my French. I just want to make sure you know what you're getting into. No one would want you to burn out, you understand, Mr. Stark." 

Mr. Stark. The words tasted unfamiliar in his mouth, bitter, acerbic. Too much like his father. The words hung in the air for a moment, popping like soap bubbles, and catching Tony in the eye with a stinging burn that he hadn't felt in quite a while. He bit at the inside of his cheek, aware of the advisor watching him, willing himself to take silent, deep breaths, don't think about it, don't worry, you will never be like him, never never never. 

"I understand," he said, his voice coming out harsher than intended. He cleared his throat, swallowed, said it again, softer, smoother, trying to gloss over the moment. "I understand," he repeated quietly. "I just think those degrees will be the most useful for my future career at Stark Industries. The company at the moment is without a president, and I certainly wouldn't want to delay the process of ascension, so the faster I can get my credentials, the better off everyone will be. You understand." 

The advisor studied him for a moment, before shrugging and nodding as she turned back to her computer. "If that's what you want, I certainly can't stop you," she said as a little printout chugged out on her desk. She pulled it from the tray and handed it to him - a schedule of the classes he would need to take in order to complete his undergraduate and Masters' degrees. He mouthed their titles silently to himself: The Physics of Life Science, Circuits and Resistors, Magnetism and Molecules. They tasted sweet in his mouth, wiping away the Mr. Starks. 

He thanked the advisor and walked back to his dorm, the newly fallen snow crunching under his boots, his breath spilling out in hot puffs from the tiny gap in his scarf, his hands huddled in his coat pockets, where the schedule lay folded neatly, tightly creased, inside a gloved fist. 

* * *

"Sorry I left you for Christmas," he apologises by way of greeting, assuming Steve is awake. He always is. "And New Year's. I know the laptop speakers hurt your ears or your mind or whatever, but it's not quite worth it to pack up this big bulky thing," - he nudges the CPU with a toe, as if Steve can feel it - "for just two weeks. Jarvis is probably having a blast in Baja by now, doing whatever it is butlers do in tropical islands." 

A yawn. A cough. "Oh, no, that's okay," Steve drawls, voice roughened by sleep, and Tony wonders what it would be like to wake up next to him. Thinks about how, in a way, he sort of already does, and tries to pat away the blush that is blooming on his cheeks, even though there is nobody to see them. He discards his coat and gloves and scarf to the side, placing the folded schedule neatly away in a drawer. "I hope your Christmas and New Year's was good?" 

"It was decent," Tony agrees. "I ate too much."

"That's good," Steve says, a little laugh in his voice, and Tony smiles. "I remember Bucky's mother always made cherry pie for Christmas. From a can, not anything fancy, but I remember it was the best thing I've ever eaten, every year, simply because we didn't really have anything." 

And there it is - that name - Bucky. And Tony doesn't even need to look at the comic books in his bookshelf gathering dust, doesn't even need to flip through any of them to know that he can't deny it any longer. He wants to. Wants to tell himself that this is still his Steve (because he  _is_ his, now, and has been for the past sixteen years) and not Steve Rogers, that it cannot possibly be. Bucky must be a common name, right? That must be it, that has to be it, there's no - 

"James Buchanan Barnes." With every syllable Steve pronounces, Tony feels a wrenching panic deep in his gut. "He went to war, you know. I never could. I was a 4-F. I guess I must still be." 

Tony bites at his lip, debating on what to say. 

_You aren't. Not a 4-F, I mean. Not anymore. Not since my father, not since super serum, not since World War 2 -_

_Not since._

In the end, he settles on cracking open one of his elementary school history textbooks, and continues reading through World War II. And the numbers are safe, they always have been, tactile and factual, but even as he says them and listens to the catch in Steve's breath, 11 million, 38 million, 200,000, he finds his mind straying towards the man he's idolised as Steve Rogers, as Captain America, and his Steve. He finds his breath catching as he thinks about his Steve parachuting down into death camps, thinks about his Steve coughing past gas and the stench of fear and desperation, thinks about his Steve holding up star-emblazoned shield to a barrage of firing squads, but a shield isn't nearly big enough for that sort of thing, is it? 

Steve thinks that his voice is hesitant because of the numbers. Tony wants to swallow roughly and tell him that the numbers have nothing to do with it, that yes, they were terrifying statistics but he cares about a one more. He doesn't say anything, lets Steve think that that is the case. 

"The atomic bombings by the U.S. of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the last events to occur before total Axis surrender during World War II," Tony read, the words skimming through his brain and out his mouth, mingling with Steve's soft, even breathing, catching a bit at the edges. "To this date, they remain the first and only usages of nuclear warfare. These events' part in Japan's surrender and the ethics surrounding it are still highly debated." 

"What do you mean, highly debated?" Steve asked, sounding confused. "You would think that this sort of...thing, would be discussed thoroughly before implementation, right?" 

Tony stared hard at the screen for a moment, even though Steve couldn't see him. 

"Yeah," he agreed. "But some people say that, you know, Japan had already surrendered before this. That the bombings were sort of an over the top reaction, that they didn't have to happen at all." 

Steve swallowed, roughly. "You said these were U.S. made bombs?" 

"I did," Tony agreed. "They were." 

Both of them pause, silent, waiting to hear Steve's inevitable question -  _Did your father help make them? -_ but it never comes, and Tony never mentions it again. 

If Steve had asked, the answer would have been yes. Tony wasn't sure if he would have wanted to say otherwise. 

But Steve didn't ask, and Tony tucked away the memories of diagrams of mushroom clouds, the chemical compositions that would wipe out entire cities, tucked the memories of his father's long, elegant signature over these documents away. 

"You will never be like him, you know that, don't you?" Steve asked, and Tony hurriedly wiped away the tears that began stinging his eyes. "You're a good kid. I know you are." 

"Thanks, Steve," Tony whispered, and prayed that what Steve said was true. 

 


	18. The Boy in the Reflection

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It is June 2001. Tony would be considered a "super senior," spending an extra year at MIT in order to get Master's degrees. Some schools have progressive programs, where you can start working on graduate school degrees while you are still an undergraduate.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written to: [Over It - Relient K](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBjlB6QVpfA).
> 
> Enjoy.  
> Misaya

Tony wished, not for the first time, that the tassel on his graduation cap would stop blowing in the breeze, its crimson cords tickling his nose in quite an irritating fashion. He knew Jarvis was somewhere in the crowd, probably taping the whole thing so they could watch it on the VCR later, and it wouldn't look very good if he was itching at his nose for three-fourths of the film. Jarvis, old English codger that he was, would probably sniff dramatically and dry his eyes on his plaid handkerchief and tell Tony how he had grown up to be a fine strapping young lad, how it would just be about time to buy Tony his first horse-drawn carriage so that he could go clip-clopping around the cobblestoned streets and court pretty young lasses, like Jarvis had back in his day. 

He smiled to himself, the corner of his mouth tilting up, and he watched the sunlight dancing across the soft green lawn, bouncing off the stain-glass windows of the library where he'd spent many quiet hours, poring over books and business plans, getting lost in words and numbers and trying not to think about Steve. 

Tony had recently been playing around with Steve's program at Steve's request, and had figured out a way to upload a whole cache of historical newspapers and documents so Steve could read them to himself or look at them. Steve had asked him if he wouldn't mind doing it, he knew Tony was busy with school and friends and whatnot, but Steve would really like to catch up on the past few decades, surely that couldn't be too much to ask? Tony had swallowed back the fact that he didn't really have too many friends - 

_Oh, that's Tony Stark, did you hear about his father? Such a shame!_

_I heard he's going to be the new CEO of Stark Industries. He must be loaded._

_Bit a loner, don't you think?_

\- and instead he spent long hours at the library, trying to ignore the other students' stares and whispers, and trying not to wonder why they never mentioned Maria. Surely she was just as important as Howard. Surely she was. But apparently, in the grand scheme of things, she was just a faceless woman, whose only major contribution to the world was to give Howard Stark an heir. 

_In the evenings, when Tony got back from the library or from late labs, Steve was quiet, the only indication that he was awake a soft whispering as he mouthed the words to himself. "Vietnam," "My Lai," "Agent Orange."_

_"Stark." The hard k noises and hisses of the "s" chilled him to the bone, and he wished Steve good night and rolled himself into his covers, rubbing his arms and trying to erase the cold hard knot that had taken up root in his chest, spilling through his veins._

_"I'm not like him, you know," he'd said one night. "I'm not."_

_"I know," was Steve's response, and he sounded so sure and confident of his answer that the ice in Tony's heart cracked open and gave him warmth, if only just the tiniest bit._

"Anthony Stark!"  _  
_

He jerked himself back to the present, found his classmates looking at him with congratulations and unreadable expressions in their eyes. Tony swallowed, stood up, shaking out the pins and needles in his legs, and went forward, the grass swishing against the hem of his gown, to accept his diploma.

* * *

"Your last summer as a child, I'm afraid, Mr. Stark," Jarvis said playfully, ruffling Tony's hair even more than the graduation cap had. They had finished loading Tony's belongings into the car, and a bag of Jarvis's famous oatmeal-and-chocolate-chip cookies was melting on Tony's lap as Jarvis slotted the key into the ignition and pulled away from MIT's marble pillars and green lawns, away from hot plate cup of noodles and saltine cracker dinners and late nights in the library, old, aged books surrounding him on all sides with comforting yellowness and the smell of old ink and paper. "I hope you're ready to take the position at the company this fall. Don't worry, I'll make sure you're in good shape for taking it, and they'll go slow on you the first few months, of course," Jarvis said, winking at Tony in the passenger seat. 

Tony missed it; he was staring out the window at the twinkling lights of the road and turning a few ideas over in his head. 

" - the company's stock has been doing very well lately, so you'll find we have quite a bit of money to do some experimentation with," Jarvis continued on, unaware that Tony was only half-listening. "I've seen those doodles in the margins of your notebooks, Tony. Getting a bit old for Captain America, aren't you? A childhood fantasy, and the country is safe enough now, demand for that sort of thing - you know what I mean, vibranium shields, super serum - isn't very high right now, wouldn't you agree?" 

_Artificial organs - hearts, lungs, livers - for people who might have the misfortune of having defective or broken ones._

"Granted, he was quite the hero back in his day, your father knew him, as I'm sure you know -" 

_Sustainable agriculture, ways to produce more food for the growing population without putting strain on natural conditions._

"And perhaps he was just the thing that the United States needed, during that time -" 

_New forms of medicine, able to weed out defective cells and germs in a person's body, eradicating disease and sickness._

"I wonder where he could be now? No body has ever been recovered, even to this day, when we have more technology than ever before."

Tony started, looked over at Jarvis, who still seemed perfectly content to just remain talking to himself, and stared down at his lap, offering no answer. 

* * *

His first day at Stark Industries was a bright, hot, August day, and men wore their shirtsleeves rolled up and women wore big-brimmed floppy hats and pale sundresses. The crush in the subway was almost oppressive, sweat and flowered perfume and the spicy hint of aftershave all rolled up into one, and Tony tried to make himself as small as possible in a corner of the carriage as the train hissed to a stop and more people got on, pressing and pushing against each other. A briefcase jabbed into his ribs, and he looked up at the owner, who just rolled his eyes and muttered something about kids playing hooky. 

Jarvis had wanted to drive him to work that day, but Tony had insisted on riding the subway to work, at least for the first day. Jarvis had seen that determined set in his eye, the one that reminded him incredibly of Maria - God bless her soul - and had let him go, with a subway card pressed firmly into his hand. 

The train doors hissed open at his stop, and Tony tripped out after the owner of the briefcase, wending his way in between the masses of people, keeping his subway card clutched tightly in his hand as he followed the man out the terminal and down the bright, hot street towards Stark Industries. 

"Don't you have anywhere better to be going?" the man asked, rounding on him just as they were about to enter. "Oughtn't you to be in school right now?" 

Tony looked up at him, startled. He caught a glimpse of his reflection in the bright plate glass of the front lobby of Stark Industries, saw what the man must be seeing: A boy, in his late teens or early twenties at most, clear skin and big eyes and dark strands of hair almost touching the collar of his starched white button down shirt that his mother must have ironed for him just that morning, dark wash jeans and dark leather shoes that some kind individual that probably given to him for a gift for college interviews. Innocent. Unscathed. Ignorant about the true nature of the world. 

He pressed his lips together, said "Thank you" without being sarcastic as the man pulled open the door, and trotted inside, goosebumps running up and down his arms at the cool air inside the building. 

By the receptionist's desk, Mr. Williamson and a few other men were standing, hands in pockets, talking. When Tony walked in, they glanced in his direction before smiling and walking over towards him. The man with the briefcase, assuming they were coming towards him, straightened up a bit, fixed his face into a happy, confident expression, patting down any flyaway hairs that might have escaped his perfect coiffure. His look turned to shock as Mr. Williamson and the others held out their hands to Tony to shake. 

"Mr. Grant, I see you've already had the pleasure of becoming acquainted with Anthony Stark, our new CEO," Mr. Williamson said pleasantly, addressing the man with the briefcase. Mr. Grant had the decency to look ashamed of himself before nodding respectfully at Tony and muttering something about already being late to a morning meeting and hurrying away down another hallway. 

Tony watched him go, and wondered what it would be like if he really was what his reflection said. 

* * *

It was early September, and Tony was bored out of his mind, doodling prototypes for artificial organs on his yellow legal pad while he was supposed to be listening to Mr. Williamson gab on about the company's third quarter stock revenues, the bright jagged red arrow cutting a smooth diagonal up across the chart. The sunlight was dancing across the smooth mahogany of the conference table, and Mr. Williamson had one of those old-man voices, a cross between history teacher and crotchety old grandfather, and Tony was trying his best not to fall asleep. 

He was staring absentmindedly out the boardroom window, admiring the architecture of the World Trade Center, it really was quite beautiful - 

_and those planes were flying really low, weren't they?_

and Tony barely heard his pencil clatter to the floor, the graphite point shattering, didn't catch Mr. Williamson's irritated glance at him - 

_surely they're not going to, they're not going to, they can't be, they just can't -_

he reached out a hand, as if he could fix this, as if he could will the pilots to veer a different course - 

_they are..._

A scream tore its way through his throat, and Mr. Williamson looked over his shoulder, and the boardroom erupted in confusion as a wave of noise, crashing and banging and tinkling washed over them, as they watched a black billowing cloud of smoke spilling from a gashing wound in the building only a few blocks away. 

* * *

"Tony, you're okay, it's okay, I promise." 

Jarvis's comforting voice swam through the confusion, and Tony grasped at it, trying to focus on the man in front of him. Jarvis was leaning over him, talking comfortingly, his voice low and soothing, and Tony wondered how he managed to keep up such a straight face. Wasn't he terrified? 

He kept looking out the window of his apartment, trying to convince himself that it was just a dream, that the dark clouds of ash on the horizon were just thunderclouds gathering in the distance. Tried to pretend that the news broadcasts, all shouting about terrorist attacks and the World Trade Center and suicide bombings, were happening in another country, that surely it couldn't have happened here, not here, anywhere but here. 

Silently, without speaking to Jarvis, Tony pushed away the bowl of soup Jarvis had set in front of him, and walked to his room. 

* * *

"Steve," Tony murmured, running a hand over the top of the monitor. "Steve, you there?" 

"Hm?" Steve's voice sounded far away, a little bit hoarse, and Tony wondered for a moment if he was getting sick. If that were possible. Or if he were just tired. "What is it, Tony? Are you doing construction at your house? I heard some noises earlier today, and I know you've always been going on about building a library or something." 

Tony paused, absentmindedly stroking the top of the monitor with his thumb, collecting dust. The words stuck in his throat, all rough and jagged. 

"It is September 11, 2001," he told Steve, and Steve made a noise in his throat. 

"That's nice, Tony," Steve said. "Is today a special day? Your mother's birthday, maybe?" 

Tony lay down on his bed, wrapping his arms around himself and hugging tightly. "Today's certainly one of a kind," he said after a moment. "I've never been so scared in my life," he whispered, and when Steve had no reply, having not heard Tony's last remark, Tony hugged his pillow to his chest and let the tears crawl down his face, wishing for the boy in the reflection to come back. 

* * *

 

_I've managed to move a bit more. I feel strong, and whatever's above me, that light blue, black surface, has started to crack. I can crack it even more if I just clench my fists, but I haven't regained full movement yet. This sort of reminds me of another time, strapped down into a chamber, screaming for them to let me out, screaming that it hurt, billions of needle point injections and a bright blue-white light, and then stepping out into the clinical light of an experimentation chamber to applause and smiles, and thinking that never before had the ground seemed so far away..._

_That was when they gave me another name, when they assigned me a new rank. Captain, they called me._

_Captain Rogers? That sounds wrong. It couldn't have been that._

_It was definitely Captain something or other._

* * *

 

_It happened today._

_That thing I said was going to happen, that really, really bad thing. I don't know how I know, I just do, I can feel it in the pit of my stomach, a hard, nauseating knot tying up my insides into pure fear._

_I don't know what it is._ _Tony didn't say._

_He whispered, "I've never been so scared in my life." I don't think I was supposed to hear._

_Maybe I was._

_Thinking that it could have been the latter is only more painful._

 

 

 

 

 


	19. Grown Up

When he shut his eyes at night, he could still see it, could still see the plane moving as if in slow motion, a sudden hush over the boardroom as they all collectively watched -  _this can't be happening this is a nightmare and you will wake up any time now I swear it because nothing this bad can ever happen in real life_ \- as the plane smashed into the building just some distance away, fire, smoke, glass cracking and sprinkling down onto the sidewalk below. Tony swore he could taste it: ashes, paper, ink, toner, something that tasted coppery sweet and horrible, in the back of his throat whenever he woke up in the middle of the night, sweating through his sheets and shivering like he had forgotten what warmth was. 

He moved through his days listlessly, signing off on forms that really meant nothing to him anymore. He woke up in the mornings and drank his coffee, tasting smoke with every sip, and the caffeine reminded him all too much of the horror palpitating through his heart every time he thought of that plane - _those planes_ \- and he hated waking up with the taste of fear hidden in the corners of his mouth, slowly seeping onto his tongue throughout the day so that every time he looked out the window at the gashing hole in the skyline he could feel it slipping down his throat cold and congealing. 

And, though he had not thought of his father in days, months, years, Tony found himself waking up with a scream on his lips and memories of Howard Stark searing the forefront of his mind.

_"It's time to grow up, Anthony. Membranous organs, sustainable agriculture, that's all very well and good, but not if you aren't safe enough to do them. Which you're not. Grow up, boy! Now is not the time to be scared!"_

Tony found himself shaking the words out of his head every morning before he went to work, and tried to ignore the fact that, as he looked in the mirror, past the shaving cream and glassy smudges, he was beginning to resemble his father more and more every day. 

* * *

The newspapers were filled with news about Tony Stark and his new sustainable agriculture concepts, but nobody bothered to actually check up on Stark Industries real objective. People were too scared to go out in the evenings, and gathered their children indoors before dusk even started to streak the horizon with purple. Milk soured before the expiration dates printed on the carton, and eggs cracked in their cardboard boxes even though they had been checked diligently at the grocery store, and mothers sat down in the middle of the afternoon and cried for no reason at all. 

And, because Tony wasn't a superhero, not by any means, he found himself swept up in a haze of terror that always seemed to be lurking just around the corner, sitting just in the next room, a great heaving beast that pressed down into his rib cage the very instant he let out a breath and thought that they might be safe. 

Nobody deserved to be this scared, Tony was sure of it, and in the spring of 2002 Stark Industries once again began to manufacture weapons technology. 

* * *

"How have things been with your company?" Steve asked him one lazy spring afternoon, when there were no more meetings to be had and Tony had already loosened his necktie -  _a noose, more like_ \- for the day. "I know you only started recently, but I take it things are going pretty successfully? You don't seem to be complaining as much as...before." 

Before? Tony wanted to laugh. It was funny how tragedies worked that way, so you could easily divide your life into the before and the after. 

"They've been decent," Tony replied, for lack of a better word. "We've just been developing some new things that'll help keep us all safer."

It was the truth, but Steve had probably been talking about security systems: burglar alarms and carbon monoxide detectors and little things you attached to your keys, your wallet, that would alert you to where those things were if you happened to misplace them. 

Tony wondered vaguely how you were supposed to protect something that had been taken from you. 

He muttered something he couldn't quite recall, and switched the subject. 

* * *

He was 21, and it was the night before his first overseas journey, before he finally visited his father's grave. 

There were technicalities associated with that, of course; he'd visited Maria's grave on multiple occasions, lying down on the warm earth where a soft bed of grass was now growing. He put his head by her headstone, looking up at the blue grey black - whatever colour it happened to be that time - sky and quietly talking to his mother about his day, about his feelings, about his hopes and dreams. His father's grave was only a few inches away, but Tony often bypassed it directly, his bundle of flowers held tightly in his fist, petals falling through his fingers as he bent down and pressed them into the little hole by Maria's headstone. 

But he didn't feel that this particular occasion would have made a suitable conversation for his mother. 

Like usual, he put the requisite bunch of roses beside Maria's headstone, took a few moments to brush away any dust and dead leaves that coated the surface of her grave. His father's mound, in contrast, hadn't been looked after in quite some time, and Tony would be willing to bet it was someone from the company, some reluctant well-wisher who did it more out of a sense of obligation. His father hadn't had very many friends, just business associates. 

"So, Dad," he said, almost mocking, reaching out to brush away some cobwebs that had grown in the crevices of his father's headstone. "How've you been?"

Silence. Which wasn't too much different from how it used to be, Tony thought. 

"I know it's been ages since we've talked. Or, I guess it's been ages since I've talked to you. You liked hearing the sound of your own voice, and sometimes I couldn't help but listen. I guess you had that effect on a lot of people, didn't you?" 

A soft breeze blew through the graveyard and ruffled Tony's dark hair. 

"It's like they say, the apple really doesn't fall far from the tree," Tony muttered, opening a briefcase that he had brought with him. The gentle breeze shifted the papers inside a little bit, and Tony just pushed them to one side to pull out a small amber bottle. 

"It looks like I'm growing up, Dad, after all this time," he said, a bitter little smile quirking up the corners of his mouth as he unscrewed the whiskey cap and took his first swallow of alcohol. 

He ended up coughing most of it out onto the ground beside his father's headstone, and whatever little he'd actually managed to swallow ended up burning his throat and his stomach for the rest of the day. 

That particular patch of ground, where a bouquet of flowers might have gone beside Howard Stark's grave, would end up blossoming into a patch of thorns. 

* * *

"Steve," Tony announced as he walked into his bedroom after furiously scrubbing at his teeth, trying to get the taste of whiskey out of his mouth, "I'm going to be gone for a few days." 

"Oh? What for?" Steve asked. 

"A business trip, to oversee some factories we've established internationally. Boring stuff." 

"Your security things, right?" 

Tony hesitated for a second before shrugging it off and throwing more dress shirts into a suitcase. "Right. More security stuff."

"Okay," Steve said, complacent and agreeable. "Well, stay safe, won't you?" 

"Right. I will." 

As he said this, Tony looked at the screen, a little bubble of happiness expanding in his throat as he smiled at the knowledge that Steve was, in his own little way, concerned for him. 

* * *

_Tony is probably boarding his plane now. He said good-bye again this morning before he left, but I might have been half-asleep and imagining the whole thing. It's a bit odd, now that I can tell the difference between being awake and asleep. Tony told me it might have been something like lucid dreaming, which is where I can apparently control the content of my dreams. I think that's a pretty cool concept, but I sincerely hope that these past years (has it really been years?) haven't been a dream. Tony feels too real to me now to let go._

_He was telling me about his security measures that he's developing at Stark Industries._

_I know all about them._

_Tanks, antiaircraft turrets, heat-seeking missiles. It's all there, in the spaces between Tony's words, in his hesitations when I ask him about them, in the little pauses I hear in his enthusiasm._

_The pauses that tell me that he's grown up, long before he should be. But I guess that was always true._

_I've been shivering non-stop, but I can't ever seem to get warm. The light above me and the bubbles and cracks and whatnot seem to be getting brighter, and for the first time it feels like I can hear voices other than Tony's._

_Maybe I really am going crazy._

_I've remembered it. Or at least, most of it._

_Me being friends with Tony's dad, kissing Peggy Carter and promising her I would definitely go dancing with her that Saturday, even though I knew it was a promise that would be broken before it was made; I remember saving Bucky and losing him in the space between heartbeats; I remember Dr. Erskine and his super-serum that changed me completely._

_Captain America._

_"Mama! I think Captain America is better than Superman!"_

_Oh, Tony. Do you know? You have to know, by now. My only regret is that I didn't understand sooner, is that Captain America wasn't there for you when you needed him the most._

_Come back soon._

* * *

Two days after Tony left the United States for his tour of international Stark Industries factories, a team of scientists based in the Arctic pierced through the thick floes of ice, scraped away the white shavings, and found a curious circular object, red, white, and blue, emblazoned with a star in the centre. 

 

 

 

 


	20. Wake Up

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I'm marking this as complete because, technically, we've come to the end of this particular arc (and I find 20 is a nice number). This isn't an origin story (and, since I know close to nothing about Iron Man's background, the contents of this story being gleaned from MarvelWiki) and I'm not going to claim it as such. 
> 
> However, since this IS a series, the story/plot/relationships will continue to develop. So...keep posted for that, I suppose. I'll edit in a link to the next work in Synchrony in this chapter once I've started it. 
> 
> As always, thanks for reading!  
> Misaya

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Update: Here is the 'sequel' to Awake, Aware: [Patches](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2172798/chapters/4752660).

Though they were in a perfectly sealed vehicle, the insides of which could probably meet surgery sanitation regulations, Tony swore he could feel the hot desert dust scorching the back of his throat as they bounced along through the sand, on their way to demonstrate the proper usage of the Jericho missile. Tony personally wasn't a big fan of the design - it went against most of the things he believed in - and even now he could still hear an old bioinformatics lecturer of his at MIT flinging open the door to his classroom, beckoning each student forward with a firm handshake and a statement: "First, do no harm." 

He shook his head to clear away the thoughts, and one of the junior executives accompanying him on the trip looked at him in concern. 

"Are you quite alright, Mr. Stark?" he asked, and Tony turned a bleary gaze towards him, his eyes burning from the dry air. If you squinted, and maybe tilted your head to the side a bit, the junior executive looked quite a bit like Rhodey. Tony wanted to laugh; what a blast from the past that would have been, him and Rhodey sitting side by side in the same classroom, scribbling notes about organic chem to each other, and that blonde girl who always sat next to Rhodey, what was her name? P something, the name of a spice or a plant or something equally ridiculous like that. He'd seen her resume just the other day, the application to become his personal assistant. Jarvis had insisted on it. 

"You know I'm not going to live forever, Master Stark," he'd told him matter-of-factly over the breakfast dishes one day. "I'm certainly no spring chicken. And, granted your...hideous lack of organisation, have you seen your room lately?, I think it might be a rather good idea to hire a secretary or assistant to help you keep your business matters in order. Arranging your calendar, keeping your desk tidy, your pencils sharpened, something of the sort. And I've seen many soaps in which the strapping male lead is some sort of high-powered executive who ends up falling in love with his lovely blonde secretary over some matters of state. Not that I'm saying your given secretary will have the same sort of caliber as the ones on television but -"

Tony had tuned Jarvis out at this point as he turned back to his eggs on toast. He grudgingly admitted to himself halfway through his fruit cup that Jarvis might have a valid point, as much as he wouldn't want to acknowledge the possibility of there being a world without Jarvis in it. He'd have to figure out a way to immortalise the man, perhaps modeling an AI after Jarvis's personality so he could hear the strident, sarcastic, utterly British tones on a constant basis. There was an idea. 

Pepper Potts. That was it. Like Tony had said before, an utterly ridiculous name. 

He snorted to himself, much to the junior executive's concern. It was one thing to go to the United Nations International School in Queens, it was quite another to graduate from said esteemed prep school and then go to some prestigious college on the West Coast only to return and state quite firmly that yes, you were interested in being a secretary. It was laughable, really. He wondered what she would wear to the interview he was willing to give her. 

He rested his head on the flat of his hand, leaning his forehead against the tinted window that was supposedly designed to keep a majority of the sun's harmful UV rays out. Tony certainly didn't feel like it was doing its job properly; he felt half-cooked already. 

His eyes followed a brown thing in the distance, twisting and turning, and wondered if it were possible to see mirages through tinted windows. He wondered if possibly he was having a heatstroke. 

He licked his dry lips, flaking away the chapped skin, and thought about Pepper, whom he had not seen in almost a decade, her platinum blonde hair plaited neatly in two fishtail braids that hung over her shoulders and were tied with brightly coloured elastics. The way her writing curved and sloped, her curves bubbly and her i's dotted neatly with little hearts (he'd discovered this on an examination of Rhodey's notebook when he'd presumably been looking for notes on isotopes. The twin dimples at the corners of her cheeks whenever she smiled. 

He wondered if she'd changed while she was off at university. 

He snapped his attention back to the junior executive, who was by now frantic. Tony thought it was rather silly of him; he certainly wasn't going to go anywhere, the future of Stark Industries was relatively assured, he couldn't possibly do anything so drastic that the stock collapsed in a single day, but the junior executive was pointing out the window and screaming, tugging at the handle of the car door as if he wanted to jump out. 

Tony turned, looked over his shoulder just in time to see something emblazoned with the letter "S" flying directly at them. 

The last thought that went through his head was what Steve would think about the whole thing. 

* * *

The team of scientists based in the Arctic to study the migration patterns of penguins, with the help of a few archaeologists expressly flown in for the excavation, dug out the remnants of what looked to be an incredibly well-preserved aerial navigation vehicle. Once they'd sufficiently thawed out a few of the entrances and doors, a few scientists, equipped with flashlights and notepads and thick winter coats, ventured inside the aircraft and took a look around. 

Upon finding the cockpit, the part closest to the surface of the ice, they found a body strapped securely into the pilot seat. They theorised that perhaps it had been the extremely cold temperatures that had made the environment resemble a cryogenic freezer, as the body was incredibly well preserved with no signs of decay. The red, blue, and white circular object they had identified on the surface was now shown to be a shield apparently made of vibranium; however, they had no materials with which to conclusively test the shield's composition. 

And one of the scientists, who, in his youth, had been an avid comic buff, took one look at the body and declared it to be Captain America. Without a doubt. 

* * *

_There are other voices now. Lots of them. Maybe I'm going mad._

_There's shafts of light darting all across my vision, and the voices are incredibly excited, saying what a great discovery this is, is there a possibility that Captain America might be able to be revived?_

_Revived? I had no idea I was dead._

_Talking about cryogenic preservation, the scuff of boots across some rough floor, a bright shattering light right in front of my eyes._

_"Oh my God!" the voice shouts, the light pulling away and leaving me blind. "We have pupil constriction! He's still alive, boys! He's still alive!"_

_Well, Tony could have told you that._

_Speaking of Tony, I haven't heard from him in a few days. Now I know that he's a growing boy and he probably has some other engagements to attend to, but I can't help but feel just a bit lonely. It gets that way when you haven't had anyone else to talk to._

_"Careful! Careful now!" the voice shouts. "That's right, easy, let's try to get him on the stretcher and back to base."_

_And there's the soft schick of something opening, and there are hands - warm! I've forgotten what it felt like - other than the small bubbles I get in my throat whenever Tony's half-awake and talking to me, or when he's just dozing off to sleep, his voice all warm and syllables all round like honey in your mouth..._

_The feeling of motion and my eyes, open, looking at dark shapes and faces and big smiles that I've never seen before, and suddenly, inexplicably, I feel horrifyingly alone._

* * *

**BREAKING NEWS**

**The recent discovery of Steve Rogers (Captain America) has thrown the nation into confusion. Some, including military buffs and veterans alike, are amazed and proud and eager to hear what the Captain has to say on the state of current affairs. Others, particularly a sector of the scientific community, are also eager, but for different reasons in that they are putting proposals forward to study the Captain's physiology and any long term effects of the "super soldier serum," as they have dubbed it, on his body. Committees all across America are currently in meeting in regards to the ethics of this matter, as the Captain at present is thawing out in an unspecified location under the protective wing of SHIELD authority Nicholas Fury. He, and SHIELD, have no comment on the subject.**

**In other news, entrepreneur and rising young CEO of Stark Industries, Anthony Stark, has gone missing. His itinerary, according to a household worker (Edwin Jarvis) consisted of travelling to several foreign countries to check up on international SI factory operations. He has been confirmed to have landed in Afghanistan two days prior; however, current word of the CEO is unknown. The United States intelligence agencies are undergoing investigations.**

**Nothing further.**

* * *

"Hey, you alright?" 

I look up from the newspaper I'm reading. A woman with hair the colour of fire stands in my kitchen doorway, leaning against the jamb and tilting her eyebrow at me. 

"Fine, I suppose." My voice is still gritty - the scientists tell me that it'll go away on its own, anyone's voice would be hoarse after seventy or so years encased in ice. "Just reading." 

"Yeah, I can see that, Cap." She grins, a dimple appearing in the corner of her mouth, and for an instant she looks so much like Peggy that it takes my breath away and I have to pinch myself very hard on the thigh to remind myself that this isn't 1941 anymore. "Getting used to the 21st century? We've even got electronic news that you can get through the television or through your computer." 

"Yeah, it's amazing," I tell her, and turn back to my newspaper, racking my brains for why the name "Anthony Stark" seems so familiar. I can feel it on the tip of my tongue, I can get glimpses and tastes of small scenes deep in my mind, but for the life of me I can't figure out why. "Stark," I reason, is familiar because I knew a Howard Stark back in the 40s. But this Anthony person, I'm fairly sure I've never met anybody named that. The article described him as "young," so I'm assuming he can't be some sort of brother to Howard; perhaps he's a distant relation, or maybe that last name is more common now. 

The scientists tell me that it's only natural to have some memory loss, and, furthermore, most people forget their dreams almost as soon as they wake up, and not to worry about it. 

They tell me not to worry, that I'll be okay, but their fancy monitors and blipping machines don't tell me why there's a knot in the base of my throat that makes it hard to swallow every time I see Anthony Stark's name in the papers or on the television. 

Let's put it another way: Imagine you had the best dream; you could do anything. You could fly, you could solve global problems, you had a happy marriage with the most attractive, most successful, most amazing person of your choice. 

Now. Imagine you wake up, and you try desperately to remember every aspect of that dream, but the details slip out from your fingers like water. 

Isn't that devastating? 

That's a bit like what I'm feeling right now. 

Maybe being awake isn't all it's cracked up to be. 

 


End file.
